全周に圧力センサを搭載したヘビ型ロボットによる曲管の認識

抄録

A snake robot that we have developed can move the inside and outside of a pipe by using helical rolling motion. This capability is expected to be useful for pipe inspection. In research on snake robots, it has been studied to adapt reaction force from environment. However, adaptation of reaction force from environment during helical rolling motion has not been realized. Therefore, in this paper, we developed a snake robot that can measure pressure force around the whole body of the snake robot by using CoP sensor. In addition, we proposed a method to recognize a bending pipe during helical rolling motion. In the method, the snake robot recognizes arrival to a bending pipe and bending direction of a bending pipe by using data of CoP sensor and IMU. The proposed method is verified by actual experiments.