Design of a Flexible Robot for Inspection in Confined Spaces

The complex shape of aircraft engine blades, combined with their location in confined spaces, poses significant challenges for inspection tasks. These confined spaces not only limit the operational range of inspection equipment, making the task more difficult, but also hinder traditional rigid robots from flexibly adapting to complex paths. Additionally, manual inspection methods often require disassembling the engine, which is both costly and inefficient. To address these challenges, this paper presents a flexible robot designed for use in confined spaces. The robot features a hinge-joint design, with a continuum flexible arm at the proximal end, allowing it to adapt flexibly to narrow environments, and a jointed flexible arm at the distal end, providing high load-bearing capacity. Furthermore, coordinated movement and pose decoupling of the two-segment continuum are achieved through fixed tendons at both ends. Experimental results demonstrate that this robot exhibits high flexibility and load capacity during blade inspection, significantly improving inspection efficiency and showing great potential for applications in confined-space inspections.