STTR Phase I: Fast non-destructive inspection of confined-space industrial assets with a novel vine robot

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project focuses on improving the reliability and safety of industrial infrastructure through advanced robotic inspection. The project addresses how autonomous systems can detect early-stage faults in pipelines before they escalate into failures, costly shutdowns, or dangerous incidents. By enabling proactive maintenance, the system reduces operational disruptions and delivers economic benefits across industries including energy, manufacturing, water systems, and semiconductor production. It also has strong public impact by protecting workers in high-risk confined spaces. The technical innovation in this Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project lies in the development of a pressure-driven soft eversion robot capable of controlled growth, navigation, and retrieval within sub-6-inch pipe networks, an innovative approach that tightly couples compliant materials, fluid-driven actuation, and embedded sensing in ways that are difficult for competitors to replicate. The project addresses fundamental challenges in achieving reliable locomotion and sensing in confined, tortuous, and contact-rich environments where conventional rigid or tethered inspection systems fail. The scope of the project is to design, prototype, and validate a soft robotic inspection platform that grows from its tip through eversion of a thin-walled tube, carrying miniaturized sensors for real-time inspection and localization. The intellectual contribution includes advancing the understanding of friction-limited soft robot propagation, improving maneuverability in complex geometries, and developing new strategies for integrating sensing and mapping within severe size and power constraints. This work will contribute to the broader fields of soft robotics, autonomous systems, and infrastructure monitoring. The proposed methodology combines mechanical design optimization, control strategy development, and experimental validation. First, the project will enhance navigation and retrievability by refining material properties, pressure regulation, and operator control schemes to better handle bends, diameter transitions, and variable surface conditions. Second, it will develop a compact localization and mapping system that integrates embedded sensors with algorithms tailored to low-diameter, global position system-denied environments. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.