Autonomous driving the PIRATE robot

Finished: 2020-01-30

MSc assignment

Maintaining distribution networks used for gas or water takes a lot of time and is expensive. These networks are mainly underground and are there-for hard to reach by humans. Faculty Robotics and Mechatronics (RaM)therefore develops an autonomous snake­like pipe inspection robot, Pipe Inspection Robot for AuTonomous Exploration(PIRA TE). This robot exist out of V-shaped sections that can clamp in various sized pipes.

Sensors on board of the robot can test the condition of the pipe. Geerlings [2] implemented anew control layer using motion primitives. According to Dertien [1] a motion primitive is designed as "the smallest meaningful action that can be per-formed by the PIRATE robot". The following motion primitives are implemented by Geerlingsl clamp, unclamp, drive, bend and rotate.

This project focuses on using these primitives to drive autonomous through distribution networks containing various sorts of pipe segments.