Design Improvements for an Inspection Rover

In this paper, design improvements and simulations are proposed for an inspection rover, which has been developed for inspection tasks. Certainly, the proposed system demonstrates utility for both indoor and outdoor surveillance applications. Its compact form factor and proficiency in overcoming obstacles make it well-adapted for deployment in constrained environments where human intervention is impractical or exceedingly challenging. In fact, experienced personnel can be replaced by autonomous or teleoperated systems able to negotiate complex unstructured environments most of the time difficult to access, carrying suitable sensors and managing data to be sent and further analyzed. The surveillance can be realized by using complex mechatronic systems composed by the robots, instrumentation, and networking system to operate internal and external sensors; the former are used for navigation; the latter give information from the site of interest. In this paper, we focus our attention on the robotic structure to be used for inspection tasks. Starting from an existing hybrid rover, the paper focuses on the mechanical design and simulation of the system in order to optimize its functionality in terms of motion smoothness and compactness, maintaining the low-cost design philosophy.