Title: A novel position determination method for the modular snake-like natural gas pipeline inspection robot in a GPS denied environment

Authors: Mehmet Yılmaz; Huseyin Ayhan Yavasoglu; Kursad Gokce

Addresses: Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council, Rail Transport Technologies Institute, Kocaeli, Turkey ' Mechatronics Engineering Yildiz Technical University, 34349 Besiktas/Istanbul, Turkey ' Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council, Rail Transport Technologies Institute, Kocaeli, Turkey

Abstract: In this study, a novel approach has been proposed to determine the module positions of a multi-joint inline inspection robot operating in a global positioning system (GPS) denied environment. The robot was equipped with an inertial navigation system (INS) to provide reference coordinates and utilised the Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) method angular and linear locations. Each module of the robot is determined through transformation matrices relative to INS location. Based on the simulation results, it has been observed that the location of each robot module can be computed according to the reference INS module with a success rate of 98% to 99%.

Keywords: natural gas pipelines; non-destructive testing; NDT; in-line inspection; ILI; robot; Denavit Hartenberg; D-H method; CoppeliaSim.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGW.2023.129494

International Journal of Global Warming, 2023 Vol.29 No.3, pp.240 - 253

Received: 19 Nov 2021
Received in revised form: 24 Jul 2022
Accepted: 25 Jul 2022
Published online: 10 Mar 2023 *

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