PIPER : Robot for vertical in-pipe climbing

Abstract: In old houses, the pipes can often be in poor conditions and require cleaning to improve air quality. There are robotic solutions to this problem but often only for large industrial pipes and not for regular pipes that you would find in your home. Pipes can often be hard to access and even harder to determine the pipe’s condition. This thesis aims to research and build a small robot that can travel through pipes, gather footage and attempt to clean them. The goal is to create a robot that can climb vertically in pipes, record video inside of the pipes and detect obstacles. After research was done a prototype was built. The prototype uses spring loaded pistons that pushes wheels against the walls of the pipes to provide friction for vertical travel. To be able to perform all these tasks, the robot uses tools that can be exchanged depending on what needs to done. The ability to turn in pipes has been ignored in this thesis due to time restrictions but could be done as future work. The resulting prototype is a robot that can steadily travel vertically through pipes, carry its own weight of 750 grams and an additional load of up to 500 grams. The robot is able to stop at pre-determined locations by measuring the distance it has travelled by using a hall-effect sensor.