Design Bionic Structure and Analysis of Kinematics for Aircraft Fuel Tank Inspection Robot

Aircraft fuel tank leakage is a very common maintenance problem. A snake-like robotic detector was designed for troubleshooting leaks of fuel tank which has strong constraint and is also explosive. The robot has several flexible sections based on bionics, and it can achieve actuation redundancy by independently pulling its four driven cables to carry out a bending motion of two-degrees of freedom. A solution framework was established among the cables length, angle and tip coordinate of single section by projection curvature and coordinates transformation. The decoupled kinematics equation between the multi-sections was deduced based on the analysis of single-section kinematics. Finally the correctness of the kinematics method was demonstrated by prototype testing.