Schematic Design of an X-ray Based Robotic Welding Inspection System

Abstract

For inspecting welding seams of large-scale equipment such as storage tanks and spherical tanks, automated mobile robotic inspecting system is more effective compared with manual operations. A wall-climbing and inspection robot needs not only stable climbing ability, but also high positioning accuracy. In this paper, a flat-panel X-ray inspection based wall-climbing robotic system is developed for intelligent detecting of welding seams. The robot system consists of two Mecanum wheels based measuring cars climbing on both side of the tank wall, each of which is equipped with either a digital flat-panel or an X-ray emitter. On each car, a permanent magnet adsorption mechanism is employed to let it absorbed and climbing on the tank still wall, and a visual path tracking module is used for tracking the welding lines to be detected. To let the flat-panel X-ray work properly, two laser tracking system are applied to ensure each of two cars on the two sides of the tank wall move synchronous exactly with a limited tolerance. Some initial experiment was conducted and reported.