In the current industrial situation, inspection of pipelines at an inaccessible region in refinery during plant shutdown is performed manually using huge scaffoldings, which involves significant time and money and are a hazardous task for human beings as well. In this paper, we have designed a robot as an automated crawler for movement over pipeline terrain. These designed crawlers certainly have to move in vertical direction carrying some payload to perform their assigned task accurately at a specific height. To accomplish the above-discussed conditions, climbing crawler must possess a certain set of rules related to locomotion and adhesion of the robot for slip-free and smooth motion over a vertical pipeline. Based on literature survey and comparative analysis on shape, size, energy efficiency and mobility of different robots with mechanical examination of different characteristics of design with locomotion technique a compliant, encapsulated caged type wheel-driven robot with gripping adhesion mechanism has been developed and tested in this research, with payload capacity of about 200 gms over a ferromagnetic pipeline of scale used in different oil or gas refineries. The developed and tested encapsulated caged prototype crawler presented in this paper has cost-effectiveness as its major distinctive feature with small in size and simple in structure
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