ダクト清掃用蠕動運動型ロボットの開発

―清掃ユニットの開発と評価―

抄録

Ventilation equipment has been installed in various structures to draw in outdoor air and circulate indoor air. These ventilation installations have pipes (ducts) through which air flows. If dust accumulates in a duct, it will be carried indoors by the airflow. Dust adversely affects human health, and so these ducts must be cleaned regularly. However, the existing cleaning methods are inadequate for the Ducts having small diameter and many curved points, that are used in houses. Thus, to clean such ducts, we have developed a robot that moves imitating peristaltic crawling. This motion is suitable for moving in ducts. In addition, the robot can move and clean the duct at the same time because it moves forward by holding the pipe walls. In this paper, we develop a cleaning unit to clean the duct. After that, we conduct a cleaning experiment by the cleaning unit to calculate a cleaning performance.