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

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.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.20965 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.20965v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.20965 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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