A novel position determination method for the modular snake-like natural gas pipeline inspection robot in a GPS denied environment

In this study, a novel approach has been proposed to determine the module positions of a multi-joint inline inspection robot operating in a global positioning system (GPS) denied environment. The robot was equipped with an inertial navigation system (INS) to provide reference coordinates and utilised the Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) method angular and linear locations. Each module of the robot is determined through transformation matrices relative to INS location. Based on the simulation results, it has been observed that the location of each robot module can be computed according to the reference INS module with a success rate of 98% to 99%.