"Unità Cingolata Innovativa di una Piattaforma Ibrida per l'Ispezione di Infrastrutture: Modellazione, Progettazione e Controllo "

Inspections of both industrial and civil structures are necessary to prevent damages and loss of human life. Although robotic inspection is gaining momentum, most of the operations are still performed by human workers. Many are the factors that slow down the spread of inspection robots, in particular, the lack of versatility as well as the low reliability of these devices constitute a huge limitation. In this work, we propose a novel hybrid platform in the context of industrial inspection tasks, with the main focus on the design of the Crawler Unit. The aim is to address versatility issues exploiting modularity and self-reconfigurability. The final platform will consist of three main components: a Main mobile Base and two Crawler Units. All these systems would operate independently accomplishing specific inspection tasks. However, docking interfaces on each device will allow the systems to reconfigure into different robots extending the application range of each unit. The Crawler Unit will work mainly in constrained environments and narrow spaces. The Main Base will monitor wide areas, carrying around the Crawlers and deploying them near the inspection target. For dealing with challenging conditions, the two Crawler Units will dock together, reconfiguring into a snake-like robot. Additionally, docking to the Main Base, the two Crawlers would operate also as robotic arms, providing manipulation abilities to the system, thus allowing to perform maintenance operations as well. The Crawler kinematics and dynamics are investigated through theoretical models which provide the foundation for the mechanical design and the control algorithm development. The first prototype of the Crawler Unit validates the theoretical results achieving interesting performance over flat and uneven terrains. However, some design issues limit the prototype mobility. The second version of the Crawler tackles those issues introducing some innovations in the system design and enhances the performance of version one. Still, the project is at an early stage of development, revisions or adjustments on the mechanical systems of the Crawlers will follow. Future works would focus also on improving the dynamic models introducing common inspection scenarios for developing advanced control strategies.