This bachelor assignment contributes to the current Smart Tooling project. The main focus of the Smart Tooling project focuses on the automation in the process industry i.e. making maintenance safer, cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient by developing new robot prototypes and tools.
The main goal of the project is to create an autonomous pipe inspection robot for industrial petrochemical plants. This project consists of the design and testing of a new prototype for the pipe inspection robot. Different prototyping techniques are used in a number of design iterations in order to investigate the new innovative designs, resulting in a mock-up with internal gears in all wheels and an improved bending mechanism that is made using procedures such as laser-cutting and 3-D printing by combining parts such as wheels, gears, motors, and plates.
The new pirate has an absolute compatible design with identical modules. The new electronic infrastructure used in this prototype is suggested in order to overcome the limitations of the previous prototypes. This design does contain tests with a single V-shaped module to prove that the new design does meet the user specifications compared to the previous prototypes. The new design is highly modular using five modules of which two modules are based on. The limits were investigated during the process of building, and this makes the design a very iterative process and provides good insight in the robot.