Proposal of a Peristaltic Motion Type Duct Cleaning Robot for Traveling in a Flexible Pipe The cleaning of residential ventilation ducts is necessary to prevent damage to health. However, since residential ventilation ducts are usually thin and curved, cleaning them is difficult. It is also difficult to obtain thrust within the duct using a wheel or a snake type robot because it is hard to obtain an appropriate reaction force in a deformed pipe. Therefore, the pipe must be gripped stably even if it is flexible so that thrust can be generated to run the cleaning robot through the pipe. In this paper, we modeled a cleaning robot that uses peristaltic motion running through a flexible duct with an inner diameter of 50 mm. Then, the validity of the model was verified by experiment. Finally, a cleaning experiment was conducted and the cleaning rate was 98.7 %.

ImageGuided Locomotion of a PneumaticDriven Peristaltic Soft Robot In this work, a pneumaticdriven peristaltic soft robot with pressure feedback control and imageguided tracking is developed. Locomotion is achieved in tubelike environments by mimicking the peristaltic motion of earthworms. The soft actuators are made of silicone rubber with 3D molding and fiber reinforcements. Pressure control is performed using custommade syringe pumps and onoff controllers in Arduino. Realtime visual tracking is accomplished in OpenCV with a colorbased approach. The soft robot has a stroke of 3035mm for each cycle of actuation. This pneumatic soft robot shows great potential for application in minimally invasive surgery due to its compliance and biocompatibility.