Industrial Mobile Inspection Robots

As industrial technologies advances, the application of intelligent automated robotics becomes necessary and prevalent. The automated mobile inspection robots eliminate the danger of sending workers into the field such as industrial boilers, railway tracks, elevator shaft, etc. It dramatically reduces work hazards by avoiding sending workers into dangerous work areas.
Back in the days, the traditional industrial robot is a human-operated and somewhat efficient for-its-time machine. It requires the operator onsite to deploy the robot, remotely controlled to scour the area of interest while taking photos. The operator then navigates the safe return of the robot, acquires the images taken for analysis, looking for signs of faults and issues to schedule necessary maintenances.
The new generation of inspection robots comes with autonomous mobile technology, navigation-guidance or other mobile capabilities to suit environment needs. Also the 3D schematics of the area of interest may be pre-programmed into the system while the image acquiring, sensors and powerful CPU/ GPU combination can assess the area/ object in real time to locate problems to issue maintenance or repairs automatically. In addition to its' mobile capabilities, mobile inspection robots deployed in field may also include the following:

• A robotic extension/ rotating arm to anchor imaging devices. This offers the ability to scan the 3D image of an object for fault or multiple images of surrounding devices for real-time analysis.

• A rotating system and it can be used to access hard to reach places, whether it is to take photos, record videos, to clean, polish, paint, etc.

• Autonomous capability with GPU-aided computing power. The ability to recognize objects and avoid obstruction offers inference flexibility and can cover and scour a greater area in the field.

• Automatically issue tickets for maintenance: The application of such a robot is multifaceted and can be customized to your needs. During an inspection, discovered faults are detected in real-time and the robot will automatically issue a ticket to schedule a maintenance service.

Neousys Nuvis-5306RT system has built-in lighting controller, camera trigger, quadrature encoder input, isolated DIO, MCU DTIO, PoE ports, wireless communication, GPU-aided inference capabilities and requires minimum maintenance. It offers two advantages, autonomous and deep learning visual inference capability.

The intelligent rail vehicle inspection system with integrated vision control console and an image acquisition robot utilizes Neousys' Nuvis-5306RT GPU-aided machine vision controller.

The image acquisition robot components include an autonomous driving platform with obstacle sensor at front and back,  industrial digital line-scan cameras, area array camera, position sensor, obstacle sensor, monitor lens, lift level, multi-angle robotic arm, image acquisition computer and travel device.

The imagery acquisition robot moves into position at the front end of the track and the digital line-scan camera begins to capture the underside imagery of the carriage, moving from front to rear. Once the image acquisition operation is at the rear of the carriage, the image acquisition robot will decelerate and stop at the fixed point, extend the arm back to the standby position.

The image capturing robot starts to move using the laser to accurately guide itself to the predetermined position while extending the image capturing device mounted on the robot arm to between the bottom layer of the carriage and the bogie for scanning. The area array camera captures component imageries above the bogie; when completed, the robot moves to the other end of the bogie, captures underside images of the bogie.

All scans and images captured are fed live onto a computer monitor. When all cars have been inspected, the robot will automatically return to the initial position and shut down. Under normal conditions, the robot arm will move according to the predetermined scan path. If an obstacle is detected in the scan path, the robot arm will automatically register and return the obstacle information and re-plan the path (avoid and go-around the obstacle). The obstacle sensor is also installed on the front and back of the driving platform of the image capturing robot to avoid a collision.

The robotic arm of the image acquisition robot can rotate multiple angles to capture high-resolution images of key components such as the top, sides and bottom of the bogie. Its intelligent platform is equipped with line-scan cameras to scan the underside of the carriage and area array cameras to scan the underside of the bogie.

The track intelligent maintenance system has advanced image recognition and machine deep learning technology. It can automatically identify damaged components/ equipments from captured images and automatically generate maintenance work orders.

The image acquisition robot can be driven by two types of rails, vertical lifting (elevator shafts) or plane laying rails. It is compatible with a variety of grooves and can be customized according to onsite conditions.