Diameter-adjustable controller design of wheel type pipe inspection robot using fuzzy logic control method

Abstract

To make the pipe-inspection robot move inside the specific dimension pipeline, the crucial problem is to adjust the diameter of the robot inside the pipeline. This paper proposes a fuzzy logic controller design method for diameter control of a wheeled-type pipe inspection robot. To do this task, the following steps are executed. Firstly, a wheeled-type pipe inspection robot that can work in 150–250 mm radius pipeline is developed. The robot is developed with two modules: active module and passive module such that each module has three wheel configurations with different mechanism to expand the wheels. Secondly, kinematic models of 4 bar linkage of the robot and dc motor are presented. Thirdly, the PI controller and the fuzzy logic controller are presented for the robot to track the given robot diameter. Finally, simulation is performed to verify the performance of two proposed control methods. The results show that the proposed fuzzy logic controller can track the reference diameter better than using PI controller.