In-pipe inspection robots have proven useful in examining the inside of pipes without affecting their structure, therefore, the interest in researching these robots has constantly increased over time. There are many different types of inspection robots, but the most commonly used are the wall pressed type. This paper proposes a review of the wall pressed type inspection robots in terms of adapting mechanisms. By adapting mechanism is meant a simple linkage or a combination of linkages, with an active or passive force generation system used to adapt the robot to variations in pipe diameter. The characteristics of the different adaptation mechanisms are compared and analyzed regarding the type of linkages used, how the pressure force on the pipe wall is obtained, and the possibility of ensuring the movement through inclined or vertical pipes with elbows and branches.

During recent years, there has been a trend towards the miniaturization of the products and of the tools necessary in the industrial processes, including those for micromanipulation. For micromanipulation, the best devices are microgrippers built such as the compliant mechanisms. In this paper, a modular structure for a micromanipulation cell is proposed. The cell has three main modules: a base platform for the working area, a micro-positioning system, and a micromanipulation system. Each module has different design variants which can be combined for specific applications, the FE (finite elements). The analysis and experimental results validate the prototype proposed for this study. In the end, an application of the SiMFlex manipulation cell for an optical microscope is proposed.

Piezoelectric elements can produce a high displacement resolution with high force outputs but exhibits large hysteresis nonlinearities. An efficient way to compensate for nonlinearities is using a closed loop control technique. Another limitation for many applications is their relatively short displacement ranges. One method to avoid the above-mentioned shortcoming is to integrate a piezoelectric element with a mechanical displacement amplifier based on a compliant mechanism. This paper presents the design and closed-loop control of such a piezoelectric actuator. Using the integrated strain gauge sensors, a PI controller was designed and tested.

The paper presents the development of an multifunctional robotic arm with application for in-pipe rehabilitation and maintenance activities. The robotic arm is the result of one semester work developed in 2015 International Cooperation Project by a multinational students research teams. In the paper the design process and performance evaluation of the proposed solution is presented.

Knowledge-Based-Engineering (KBE) is a research field in which the methodologies and technologies for capturing and re-using the engineering knowledge are studied. Nowadays, the mechanisms design is accomplished by using various CAD software. Since, every CAD system includes KBE tools, those can be used to reduce time and simplify the mechanism's design process.One step in the design of the mechanisms with more than one degree of freedom is the direct and inverse kinematic analysis. This step can be difficult, because many calculations are involved and usually more than one solution exists. The geometrical constraints defined in the CAD system for the mechanism linkage's assembling, offer a simple solution for the kinematics analysis.This paper presents a KBE tool useful for kinematics analysis.The automation of repetitive tasks is implemented in an external application written in C# that it is also presented.