Publications / 2015 Proceedings of the 32nd ISARC, Oulu, Finland

Inspection Robot in Complicated 3D Environments

Tatsuo Arai, Kazuto Kamiyama, Pakpoom Kriengkomol, Yasushi Mae, Masaru Kojima, Mitsuhiro Horade
Pages 1-6 (2015 Proceedings of the 32nd ISARC, Oulu, Finland, ISBN 978-951-758-597-2, ISSN 2413-5844)
Abstract:

Almost a half century ago, Japan started to increase her national wealth and to invest social infrastructures. Those activities could have accelerated its economy and brought further national wealth. Now spending many years almost all those facilities get old and some of them are severely damaged. Appropriate maintenances are quickly required to recover and to attain their sound conditions. We started the limb mechanism project almost 20 years ago aiming at the robot application for rescuing as well as for inspection tasks in complicated 3D environments. The original idea of the limb mechanism is the realization of a compact hexapod machine capable of locomotion and manipulation in such environments based on the principle of unique limb usage for both functions. We designed and built first prototype, what we call ASTERISK, and demonstrated dexterous locomotion and manipulation capabilities including walk on ceiling underside, walk through narrow clearance, climbing up and down stairs and ladders, tightrope walk, sometimes with manipulation, and ,of course, walk on rough terrains. Now we are applying our robot to attain the inspection of the underside of bridge.?The robot has electro-magnets at the tip of legs to approach and to access the underside of iron-made bridge. In the inspection task the robot has to walk around on side wall as well as underside, then to move from plane to plane in different angles. We have made new limb design with electromagnets and conducted preliminary experiments. In the paper we will discuss the feasibility of walk on the underside of iron plate and the gait strategy in the transit from vertical plane to underside.

Keywords: hexapod, mobile manipulation, inspection, underside, bridge