Motion simulation and impact gap verification of a wheeled vibration-driven robot for pipelines inspection

Abstract

Vibration-driven locomotion systems and mobile robots are widely used in different industries, in particular, for inspecting and monitoring the pipelines. Among the great variety of such robots designs, the ones based on the wheeled chassis and equipped with the vibratory drive are of the most widespread. The novelty of the present paper consists in substantiating the design parameters of the wheeled robot working under the vibro-impact conditions and driven by the crank-slider excitation mechanism. The main goal of this research is maximizing the robot average speed. While simulating the robot dynamic behavior, the numerical methods are used, in particular, the finite-element methods and the Runge-Kutta methods, which are implemented in the SolidWorks and MapleSim software. The obtained results presented in the form of time dependencies of the robot kinematic and dynamic characteristics can be of significant practical interest for the researchers and designers of the similar robotic systems.