Masters Thesis

Development of an automated robot for nondestructive testing applications

Nondestructive testing (NDT) are methods to inspect specimens without destroying or disassembling the physical specimen. In the method used in this work, guided ultrasonic waves are transmitted into a structure, and the received waves may be altered, thus showing information about a defect or anomaly in its path. Additionally, NDT can be used for detecting structural geometries. This information can be used to generate maps of the structure, including the damage locations and structural boundaries. Currently, NDT is mostly conducted manually by human operators. If a robot is able to take NDT measurements and analyze the data to generate a map, the robot can reverse engineer the structure, detect damages, and use the information to focus on the affected area or call attention to an operator for closer inspection. In this study, a robot is designed and developed for the purpose of including an NDT module to conduct measurements on aluminum and composites plates. Additionally, a path planning algorithm is implemented on an off-the-shelf robot platform with an indoor navigation system to demonstrate the viability of autonomous drive without using GPS. Finally, NDT experiments are conducted to detect structural boundaries of the plates and the stiffened area. The various aspects of this study are for the eventual integration and development of a robot platform to automate the NDT process. An application of using NDT for mapping is to check airplane wings for defects during their maintenance sessions, in which case the stiffeners and ribs inside the wings can be located and checked against (a priori) engineering drawings.

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