Miniaturized Leg Adsorption Mechanisms of a Small Hexapod Mobile Robot for Inspecting Narrow Spaces on Walls and in Pipes

Most public infrastructure facilities in Japan built during a period of high economic growth are rapidly deteriorating. Inspecting buried infrastructure requires a great amount of labor and time, so autonomous mobile robots are required to improve efficiency and labor costs. To alleviate this shortage, robots have been developed that can inspect in-pipe and wall surfaces. However, most robots are for working in a single environment; ones that can work in multiple environments are needed. We focused on robots that can move not only on a flat surface but also inside pipes and on walls and developed a leg mechanism equipped with a removable passive suction cup. A string and winding take-up mechanism were used as the leg-up and leg-down mechanism. The leg tips are detachable so that different tips can be mounts for moving on a flat surface, inside a pipe, or on a wall. We fabricated a prototype robot equipped with this mechanism. The walking experiments with the prototype robot indicated the effectiveness of the proposed leg mechanism. We confirmed the feasibility of the compact moving mechanism of the legs with an adsorption mechanism.