Development of an inchworm-like soft pipe robot for detection

•An inchworm-like soft pipe robot is developed by reasonably analyzing and optimizing modular actuators.•The diverse robot mechanical states are analyzed to accurately calculate inflating/deflating volume of actuators.•An efficient motion control workflow is developed to coordinately control actuators to inflate/deflate orderly.•The developed robot adopting proposed motion control workflow can smoothly traverse various pipelines.