4 accepted papers
Compared with traditional in-pipe robots, tensegrity robots have exhibited many advantages such as light-weight, compliant, collapsible, low-cost, and rapidly manufacturable characteristics. However, published tensegrity in-pipe robots still have limited load capacity, because they rely on the stres
Existing in-pipe robots have insufficient adaptability when dealing with accidents in unfamiliar pipe environments. Developing a pipe robot that can be designed and manufactured quickly is one solution. The tensegrity structure is a self-stressing spatial structure formed by the interaction of rigid…
Most current in-pipe robots are usually designed for pipes of a specific size. In this letter, we propose a novel inchworm-like in-pipe robot based on the concept of tensegrity for moving in pipes with varying diameters. Firstly, a tensegrity-based robotic module capable of two kinds of shape change
This paper presents a novel concept to develop robots capable of crawling in tubular environments, inspired by the movement of earthworms and the biological musculoskeletal systems in nature. A tensegrity structures-based robotic module with shape changeability actuated by only one linear actuator i…