Crawler-based automated non-contact ultrasonic inspection of large structural assets

McMillan, Ross and Tabatabaeipour, Seyed Morteza and Tzaferis, Konstantinos and Jackson, William and Edwards, Rachel S. and Trushkevych, Oksana and Macleod, Charles and Dobie, Gordon and Gachagan, Anthony (2022) Crawler-based automated non-contact ultrasonic inspection of large structural assets. In: 49th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE 2022), 2022-07-25 - 2022-07-27, San Diego, CA.

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Abstract

This paper presents an update on the progress of developing a crawler-based automated non-contact ultrasonic inspection system for the evaluation of large structural assets. The system presented is a significant improvement on current robotic NDT crawlers and aims to greatly reduce the time of inspection by creating an internal feature map of the subject in a Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM) style method instead of using a lawnmower scanning style where all areas are scanned regardless if they contain features or are featureless. This map will be generated through rapid automated path planning and scanning and will show the location of potential areas of interest, where then, the appropriate method of inspection can be used for a high detailed evaluation. Current and ongoing work presented is as follows; the use of guided waves as the sensory input of an occupancy grid map; evaluating guided wave modes to find the mode most appropriate for this system; minimum thickness estimation using machine learning; improving the transducer setup using a unidirectional transmitter.

ORCID iDs

McMillan, Ross, Tabatabaeipour, Seyed Morteza, Tzaferis, Konstantinos, Jackson, William ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1360-4722, Edwards, Rachel S., Trushkevych, Oksana, Macleod, Charles ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4364-9769, Dobie, Gordon ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3972-5917 and Gachagan, Anthony ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9728-4120;
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