Rigorous Tracking of Weld Beads for the Autonomous Inspection with a Climbing Robot

Abstract

This article presents a novel strategy for an autonomous inspection robot for oil industry tanks. The goal is to identify and track the external weld beads of a tank by an inspection robot. The chosen robot is an autonomous climbing robot with differential magnetic wheels. The detection of the weld bead is made with a line profile sensor. An algorithm is proposed to identify the weld bead position from the robot. The control is designed with the Fuzzy technique. The approach is evaluated on a real plate and a cylindrical tank virtually designed with the same characteristics that real tank projects.