Abstract: Aiming at the special requirement of pipe-inspection, this paper presented the design of a compact articulated-tracked robot. Based on the structure design of the robot, several mathematical models describing the relationship between the posture and the capacity of the robot’s obstacle negotiation were established. And the effect of posture regulation on the performance of the robot’s obstacle negotiation was also investigated. Using an optimization technology, this paper gave the calculation results for the max-imum step height and the adaptive moving posture during the process of obstaclenegotiation. The Matlab simulation of the model and the experiment verify the improvement of the robot performance by the design and optimization presented in this paper.

Key words:  pipe-inspection, articulated-tracked, obstacle negotiation performance, optimization method, posture regulation