抄録
The 1-inch gas pipes are used in houses and between gas meters and the main pipe which lies under the road, and requires regular inspection. However, an endoscope has the limit of the scope on inspection. In addition, in-pipe robots cannot pass through a 90-degree elbow, whose radius of curvature equals its inside diameter. In this study, we developed the peristaltic crawling robot with pneumatic artificial muscles for 1-inch gas pipes. This robot can pass through the elbow horizontally and vertically. In addition, this robot can be equipped an endoscope. However, this robot cannot pass through the continuous elbows. It lies in the actual environment certainly. In this paper, to use a robot in the actual environment, we developed the robot which can pass through the continuous elbows. We experimentally confirmed that the robot can pass through the continuous elbows.
