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. Indeed, the proposed system can be used for indoor and outdoor surveys, and due to its com-pactness and ability in overpassing obstacles is well suited to be used in confined spaces, for which it is difficult or almost impossible human interventions. Re-cently, great emphasis has been placed to the development of novel monitoring and inspection methodologies, taking advantage of the enormous diffusion of Ro-botics and Mechatronics. In fact, experienced personnel can be replaced by au-tonomous or teleoperated systems able to negotiate complex unstructured envi-ronments most of the time difficult to access, carrying suitable sensors and man-aging data to be sent and further analyzed. The survey can be realized by using complex mechatronic systems composed by the robots, instrumentation, and net-working 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. In particular, starting from an existing hybrid rover, the paper focuses on the me-chanical design and simulation of the system in order to optimize its functionality in terms of motion smoothness and compactness, maintaining low-cost design philosophy.