Robotic Crawler for Structural Health Monitoring of Tanks and Furnaces

Vaibhav Poddar, P. Ganesh

Abstract


In Metallic (ferrous) storage tanks and furnaces weak spots are developed and this needs to carry out regular maintenance and inspections tasks. Manual inspection (such as, visual inspection) is a difficult and time consuming task. This paper aims to replace human inspectors by designing a wall crawling robot with permanent magnetic wheels. The Robotic crawler has been designed to be operated in either an autonomous mode or tele-operation mode. The robotic crawler is capable of transmit real time video and safely traverse between boundaries walls even if they are perpendicular. The on-board central control system is present in the robotic crawler which manages multiple sensors and coverage algorithms help robotic crawler to navigate autonomously to the desired location of the wall. A prototype of robotic crawler has been developed and operated in various constrains. The developed robotic crawler does have enough capacity to travel for about 40–45 min and covers approximately 300–350 m distance.

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References


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DOI: https://doi.org/10.37628/ijra.v1i2.28

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