Novel Locomotion Methods in Magnetic Actuation and Pipe Inspection

There is much room for improvement in tube network inspections of jet aircraft. Often, these inspections are incomplete and inconsistent. In this paper, we develop a Modular Robotic Inspection System (MoRIS) for jet aircraft tube networks and a corresponding kinematic model. MoRIS consists of a Base Station for user control and communication, and robotic Vertebrae for accessing and inspecting the network. The presented and tested design of MoRIS can travel up to 9 feet in a tube network. The Vertebrae can navigate in all orientations, including smooth vertical tubes. The design is optimized for nominal 1.5 outside diameter tubes. We developed a model of the Locomotion Vertebra in a tube. We defined the model\u27s coordinate system and its generalized coordinates. We studied the configuration space of the robot, which includes all possible orientations of the Locomotion Vertebra. We derived the expression for the elastic potential energy of the Vertebra\u27s suspensions and minimized it to find the natural settling orientation of the robot. We further explore the effect of the tractive wheel\u27s velocity constraint on locomotion dynamics. Finally, we develop a general model for aircraft tube networks and for a taut tether. Stabilizing bipedal walkers is a engineering target throughout the research community. In this paper, we develop an impulsively actuated walking robot. Through the use of magnetic actuation, for the first time, pure impulsive actuation has been achieved in bipedal walkers. In studying this locomotion technique, we built the world\u27s smallest walker: Big Foot. A dynamical model was developed for Big Foot. A Heel Strike and a Constant Pulse Wave Actuation Schemes were selected for testing. The schemes were validated through simulations and experiments. We showed that there exists two regimes for impulsive actuation. There is a regime for impact-like actuation and a regime for longer duration impulsive actuation

Feasibility of active vision for inspection of continuous concrete pipes.

This thesis describes work to establish the feasibility of using active vision on a mobile robot to improve survey techniques for concrete and clay sewers of less than 1m diameter. Software and hardware components of a prototype mobile remote visual sensing system have been designed and developed. The active vision system (AVS) operates within smooth-walled small-bore pipes (0.5m < d < 1.0m). The AVS consists of two distinct, but related hardware components, a controllable (pan and tilt) camera head mounted on a remote control tractor and a system control unit which interfaces this remote system to a PC-based system supporting image capture and analysis.The software associated with the AVS comprises modules to control the camera orientation and supplement existing Artificial Intelligence vision analysis tools. The latter modules estimate the vanishing point (VP) of a sewer pipe (as a reference feature) and detect coaxial cracks in the periphery of the image (nearest the camera). Control software for the camera head has also been developed.The VP detection and crack detection modules have been evaluated on images captured from library videos of sewer surveys. The results show that the routines successfully locate the VP and can successfully detect coaxial cracks in a predefined region of interest in an image. The AVS as a whole has been tested in a laboratory setting using a short section of concrete pipe and simulated cracks in its wall. The AVS successfully implements a control cycle which determines and fixes the pipe VP, detects coaxial cracks in the pipe wall, orients the camera to attend to those cracks, and then re-fixes the VP