Abstract
This paper presents an articulated wheeled in-pipe inspection robot with holonomic rolling motion. The proposed articulated wheeled type robot can pass through elbow and branch pipes smoothly, and rotate around the pipe axis by using rollable hemispherical wheels. The robot can even twist like screw in the pipe by keeping the roll angle of the hemispherical wheels. To verify the basic behavior of this robot, preliminary experiments in an elbow pipe and a T-branch pipe were conducted. The experiments to verify the holonomic rolling motion and twist motion in a straight pipe were also performed.
