Task Planning and Control of Pipe Inspection Robots

Abstract

This paper deals with the methods of task planning, diagnosis and control for a pipeline inspection and maintenance robot. The pipe inspection robot in this paper as one of those plant service robots can be autonom-ous in terms of sensing, control and path planning in addition to the self-diagnosis. The inspection robot task is to inspect pipelines in a plant: (1) The target point for the robot to move can be goiicrcitod l'rotii llic dlrignosls knowlrdgo bcisc.. l'lius the robot can estimate and search failure causcs by sensing capabilities of the robot. (2) The path planning system is shown to find the path optimal for the robot to move from one point to the other point under some criteria. (3) The control command can be automatically generated from the result of the path planning. Thus the robot can be autonomous in terms of the decision making, sensing, path planning and motion control.