Design of an Antenna Based Sensing Robot for Inspection and Imaging of Cracks in a Ventilation Duct

Inspection of welding/bending in ventilation ducts for holes and surface cracks in the sheet metal is very important after manufacturing them and also during maintenance after installation. This paper deals with the design of an antenna based sensing robot (without a microcontroller) for inspection and imaging of ventilation ducts. It uses its antenna to sense the obstacles on its path. The motors rotate accordingly and the robot turns without any manual or computer control. The robot can climb on vertical surfaces of the duct as it has magnetic ball bearings at its base. The images/videos of the ventilation ducts were obtained by mounting a tiny Bluetooth camera on the robot. Thus this paper gives a new solution to the method adopted in the inspection of the ventilation ducts. As a future work, the captured images are to be processed using Matlab in order to identify the defects in the duct. The expected results are obtained and presented using Adobe Photoshop CS2. Index Terms Ventilation ducts inspection, Surface crack detection, Robot without microcontroller, Antenna as a sensor, Matlab.