Session: 07-03-02: Design and Control of Robots, Mechanisms and Structures

Paper Number: 95228

95228 - An Inflatable Soft Crawling Robot With Nondestructive Testing Capability for Overhead Power Line Inspection 

Inspection of overhead electric power lines is a vital task in the electric utilities’ maintenance process; however, the traditional power line inspection, using manual laborers, is very time consuming, expensive, and inaccurate in diagnosis of structural issues. mainly unmanned aerial systems such as quadcopter drones, equipped with advanced cameras have been used in recent years to address some of these issues. While they have helped to improve the efficiency of the inspection process, their limited operational time and limited remote sensing–based detection of damages and faults in the structure of the cables, which would be hard to inspect by remote sensing, have hindered their extensive applications. Therefore, the use of mobile robotic platforms which can be physically attached to the power line and inspect the cable directly and nondestructively would help to address these limitations. Particularly, soft robotics as an emerging field, has provided promising solutions to address limitations in conventionally rigid robots such complex mechanism and structures, heavy weight, bulky size, cost, manufacturing, and safety issues. This work presents analysis, designing, and prototyping of inflatable (textile-based) soft crawling robots equipped with multimodal nondestructive testing (NDT) methods such as acoustic sensing and vibration testing capabilities for inspection of overhead power line cables for diagnosis of potential mechanical faults in the structure. The inflatable soft robot is comprised of two gripping modules with radial expansion/contraction, one at the proximal and the other one at the distal end, and a longitudinal contractile-expandable driving module in-between for providing a bi-directional crawling movement. The soft robot and its soft actuators are made of fabrics and can be wrap around the power line cables for navigation along the lines. The main novelty of the current robotic inspection platform is to integrate a combined mobility and grasping components of a soft shape-morphing robot with NDT sensing system for inspection and fault detction processes. Conceptual designs and CAD models of the robot parts, textile-based inflatable structures, and the pneumatic driving mechanisms were developed. The mechanical parts were fabricated using advanced and conventional manufacturing techniques. An Arduino-based electropneumatic control board was developed including a proper pneumatic circuits, pumps, sensors, and batteries. The prototyped parts were assembled to create the initial porotype of the soft robot. Simple control algorithms and computer programs were developed for operation of the robot. The prototyped locomotion mechanisms were tested in laboratory (indoor) settings while the collected data used for modifying the designs, and control software and hardware.

Presenting Author: Nicolás Mendoza NMSU

Presenting Author Biography: NA

Authors:

Nicolás Mendoza NMSU
Hamidreza Nemati New Mexico State University
Mahdi Haghshenas-Jaryani New Mexico State University
Ehsan Dehghan-Niri NMSU