Abstract
Machines with complicated inner structures are dominating daily life with its diverse functions and high integration. With the increasing disassembling-assembling difficulty, the in-situ inspection and repairing have become important to low down the cost. This paper provided a simplified Ni-Ti shape memory alloy (SMA) based inchworm-imitated robot, aiming to perform the inspection task in narrow/confined spaces. The experiment showed that the robot marching speed reaches 0.57 mm/s under control of 1.5 A current with a voltage of 7 V. The maximum climbing angle on the metal sheet is 6° and the robot could also walk on the board paper, wood, and painted grounds after adding counterweight. The inchworm-imitated robot shows potential for micro-robot walking inside the confined space to perform the in-situ inspection. This gives the possibility of reducing the inner-structure complexity by decreasing the inspection holes, which leads to better utilization and lower sealing difficulty.
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Acknowledgment
The research leading to these results has received funding from the department of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering of the University of Nottingham, and master student project of the University of Nottingham.
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Chang, JC., Ma, N., Wang, M., Dong, X. (2021). An SMA Inchworm-Imitated Robot for Confined Space Inspection. In: Liu, XJ., Nie, Z., Yu, J., Xie, F., Song, R. (eds) Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13015. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89134-3_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89134-3_36
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