抄録
Recently, many pipe accidents have been reported. These were caused by corrosions or deteriorations, so in-pipe inspections have been performed with fiber scopes to prevent such problems; however, such pipes cannot inspect in pipes over 15 m long or in complex pipes. Therefore, in-pipe inspection robots are required for such uses. In this paper, we propose the development of the robot that mimics the peristaltic crawling of earthworms as a locomotion mechanism. In addition, we performed two experiments in 27 mm diameter acrylic pipes. These experiments were designed to examine the relationship between locomotion speed and motion patterns. The other was to see if the robot can be pass the elbow pipe. And we performed experiment in 16 mm diameter acrylic pipes to measure its locomotion speed in each motion pattern.
