Navigating a miniature Crawler robot for engineered structure inspection

This paper addresses the problem of how to navigate a miniature Crawler robot in a typical engineered structure inspection application-aircraft rivet inspection. First, a novel vision-assisted localization algorithm is developed to find the heading and position of the Crawler robot. Second, a new algorithm is developed to solve the path planning problem so that the Crawler robot can navigate through all the rivets. Experimental results validate the localization and path planning algorithms. This inspection system can be extended to other similar engineered structure inspection applications. Note to Practitioners-This paper was motivated by the problem of automated aircraft rivet inspection. Currently, a new nondestructive inspection technology has been developed for deep layer crack detection around the rivet area on an aircraft body. However, the efficiency and accuracy of the inspection system can not achieve the maximum if the inspection is manually conducted by human operators. Therefore, there is a need for automated rivet inspection. This paper develops a mobile sensor that integrates the sensor and a micromobile robot. The control, localization and path planning problems are solved so that the micro mobile robot can navigate on the airplane body surface to carry out rivet inspection without human involvement. This mobile robot based inspection system can be extended to different engineered structure inspection applications by integrating different sensors. The use of vision-assisted localization method requires that the position information of the inspected subject, such as rivets, should be known from a source such as a CAD model. Also, the surface of the structure to be inspected should be reasonably smooth to enable the robot to stick to it. Our future work will integrate multiple mobile sensors to speed up the inspection process.