AeRove drone rolls on pipes and flies for long pipeline inspections
AeRove: A Compact Bimodal Aerial-Terrestrial Drone with Rapid Bistable Reconfiguration for Close-Range Pipeline Inspection
Robotics
Summary
Inspecting pipelines up close is hard for regular drones because they use a lot of battery power when hovering and can blow away gas leaks they need to sense. The authors created AeRove, a small robot that can both fly and roll on pipes using its propeller guards as wheels. It switches quickly and without extra energy between rolling on the ground and flying to jump over obstacles. This design uses much less power and can travel much farther along pipes while still detecting gas leaks more effectively when perched.
What this means in practice
- •For pipeline inspection teams: Extend drone operating range and reduce power use by using rolling mode for pipe traversal and flying only for obstacle crossing during pipeline inspections.
- •For environmental monitoring engineers: Improve accuracy and speed of gas leak detection with drones by switching to perched inspection mode and adapting propeller airflow intake.
Authors
Caleb Polillio, Petras Swissler
Abstract
Close-proximity pipeline inspection is challenging for standard drones due to high hovering power consumption, airflow sensitivity, and propeller wash interference with gas sensing. To address this, we present AeRove, a compact bimodal aerial-terrestrial robot. AeRove uses its propeller guards as wheels to roll along pipes and employs a spring-loaded bistable mechanism to reconfigure between ground and flight modes in 200 ms without continuous actuator power to maintain either state. The converging propeller-guard geometry also improves measured thrust efficiency. By reserving flight for obstacle hopping and using ground rolling for continuous traversal, current draw is reduced 14x compared to continuous flight (0.7 A vs. 10 A), extending estimated travel distance from 144 m to 2057 m. Autonomous trials on a 51 cm diameter steel pipe demonstrated navigation on straight and curved sections, obstacle jumping, and leak detection of simulated inspection markers. Separate CO2 sensing experiments evaluated gas-detection performance under perched and aerial operating conditions. Perched inspection produced a substantially larger concentration response than hovering under the tested conditions. During flight, an underbody propeller-intake configuration produced a faster and stronger gas-detection response than an extended probe by leveraging propeller-induced airflow. Code and designs are released under the CC-BY license.