Vision-based methods for product quality inspection are playing an increasingly important role in modern industries for their good performance and high efficiency. A hybrid visual inspection system, which consists of an industrial robot with a flexible sensor and several stationary sensors, has been widely applied in mass production, especially in automobile manufacturing. In this paper, a rapi...

Robotic operations are one of the major maintenance challenges for ITER and future fusion reactors. In particular, in vessel inspection operations without loss of conditioning will be mandatory. In this context, an Articulated Inspection Arm (AIA) has been developed by CEA within the European work programme framework, which aims at demonstrating the capabilities of a multi-purpose in-vessel Rem...

A bstract After getting some experience with our first GMDSnake, we can now present the next generation: GMD-SNAKE2, a robot for inspection tasks in areas difficult to access by humans. Here we tried to imitate the natural scale-driven propulsion of a snake by wheels around the body. After a description of our robot we concentrate on a method for motion control. It allows a very flexible and co...

This paper presents a design of a versatile tracked inspection mobile robot with an adjustable drive positioning system equipped with a drilling module for space and terrestrial applications. The robot is intended to operate on open terrain and in enclosed space. Track position adaptation mechanism enables the robot to work on uneven surfaces. A concept of utilization of a lightweight core dril...

I n this paper, we present a robot system for inpipe inspection of underground urban gas pipelines. The robot is configured as an articulated structure like a snake with a tether cable. Two active driving vehicles are located in front and rear of the system, and passive modules such as a control module are chained between the active vehicles. The proposed robot has outstanding mobility oflered ...

The Northrop Grumman Space Technology (NGST) Automated Walking Inspection and Maintenance Robot (AWIMR) project was one of many NASA Technology Initiatives for the Exploration Initiative, NASA’s program for return to the Moon and Mars. AWIMR was intended to assist astronauts by moving about on the exterior of a crewed space vehicle, performing inspection and other tasks which might assist astro...

Novelty detection, recognising features that differ from those that are normally seen, is a potentially useful ability for a mobile robot. Once a robot can detect those features that are novel the amount of learning that has to be done can be reduced (as only new things need to be learnt), the attention of the robot can be focused onto the new features, and the robot can be used as an inspectio...

This paper describes the development of an object inspection system for use in f lexible manufacturing systems for the inspection of complex machined components. During operation the system f i rs t locates and ident i f ies ins tan t ia t ions of the object in the field of view of a camera system. A robot arm is then used to manipulate the object in the field of view of a sensor in order to ch...

This paper presents visual and 3D structure inspection for steel structures and bridges using a developed climbing robot. The robot can move freely on a steel surface, carry sensors, collect data and then send to the ground station in real time for monitoring as well as further processing. Steel surface image stitching and 3D map building are conducted to provide a current condition of the stru...

This paper presents a simple robot localization technique using the wireless visual servoing technique involved in an autonomous ground vehicle ODIS (omnidirectional inspection system) for under-car inspection tasks in standard parking lot environment. Based on the current architecture of ODIS and the dedicated scripting language, an iterative visual servoing scheme is proposed to align the yel...