They can move at one body length per second.
"In the future, we hope to see robots do such work to save time and effort," she says.
Images of the robot with a camera installed at the front and the robot inspecting the environment in a stainless steel pipe at a driving frequency of 1 Hz. Scale bars, 10 mm.This isn't the first robot designed to inspect centimeter- and millimeter-scale pipes. Other designs rely on wheels or other means to. But those solutions aren't always practical, according to the researchers behind the new paper.
To mitigate those limitations, engineers have turned to pneumatically powered robots that use pressurized air to move their entire length, crawling along like an inchworm. These are easier to seal and shrink to small scales because they don't have complex protrusions like wheels or legs. However, these robots tend to be slow. That's a liability — and a potential expense — if the bot needs to inspect a long pipeline. The new design powers its locomotion in a completely different way.
uses electric charges to undulate its way through a pipe using a combination of longer"elongation units" and shorter"anchoring units.""The key technology is the artificial muscles [also called"soft actuators" or “dielectric elastomer actuators”) that are powerful enough and small enough to drive the robot to move rapidly in a pipe," Zhao says. The charges cause the actuators to rapidly contract, allowing the 1.