AeRove: A Compact Bimodal Aerial-Terrestrial Drone with Rapid Bistable Reconfiguration for Close-Range Pipeline Inspection

📅 2026-09-17
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🤖 AI Summary
为解决标准无人机在近距离管道检查中的能耗高和气流敏感问题,AeRove采用空地两栖设计并通过快速双稳态重构机制实现高效管道巡检。
📝 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.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Close-proximity pipeline inspection
hovering power consumption
airflow sensitivity
propeller wash interference
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

bimodal aerial-terrestrial robot
spring-loaded bistable mechanism
propeller guards as wheels
thrust efficiency improvement
gas detection enhancement
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