A Crawling Based Locomotive Mechanism Using a Tiny Ultrasonic Linear Actuator (TULA)

A crawling based locomotive mechanism for inspection of small sized pipes is developed by using a tiny ultrasonic linear actuator. In case of piezo material based actuators, it is known that they have small displacement with high voltage supply. In order to overcome the limitation of common piezo actuators, the impact based piezo actuator(TULA) has been developed to realize long stroke up to 11 mm. By using TULA, we develop a crawling locomotive mechanism. Previously reported locomotive mechanisms such as earthworm-like and inchworm-like mechanism can not realize continuous motion but move with step-wise motion since they have clamping and elongation sequence for movement. Therefore, long time loss for movement of one stroke is inevitable. In this crawling mechanism, nearly continuous motion is achieved by using both directions of actuating forces. Owing to the light weight and the simple structure of the actuator, the crawling based locomotive mechanism has simple design with 9mm diameter, 40mm length and 1.1g weight. It shows 9.2mm/s in 18.5mm inside diameter of a pipe regardless of the pipe’s tilting angle.

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