Robotic Autoscanning of Highly Skewed Ship Propeller Blades

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for a complete scanning of ship propeller blades. Inline quality control for advanced manufacturing or inspection of operational propeller blades requires automated and highly accurate 3D measurement systems. By combining an industrial robot with a high accuracy 3D camera and a laser distance sensor, the task at hand can be fully automated. The integrated system is described in detail, with focus on initial estimation of the propeller blade position and avoiding collisions with the blade while scanning. Validating experiments are performed where a highly skewed ship propeller blade is scanned with a resolution of 0.1 mm.