ROMA: A Climbing Robot for Inspection Operations

Inspection work, often, involves a high number of dangerous manual operations especially in large industrial environments such as shipbuilding and construction. A considerable part of these operations are carried out in harsh hazardous environment~, often formed by metallic structures. The last decade has seen an increasing interest in developing and employing special robots in construction in order to assist the human operator as well as to limit the damage caused to him. For this end, the ROM robot, a specially developed sew-supported robot has been built. The robot is designed to perform 3D complex movements and navigate through metallic structures using the “caterpillar” concept. The control and monitoring of the robot is achieved through an advanced Graphical User Interface, especiah’y built, to allow an effective and user j?iendi’y operation of the robot with a minimum operator training. The GUI has been designed with an open and modular structure allowing jidure reusability and scalability when necessary. This paper describes the design of the ROM robot with a special emphasis on its GUI.