Design of A Laser-based Calibration instrument for Robot's Location Positioning on A Curved Surface

Abstract

The wall-climbing robots are used to implement their defect detection tasks under industrial contexts (e.g., tank, pipeline); however, they fail to accurately navigation due to slippage and deviation from the scheduled orbit. As a result, some significant defects have the potentials to be neglected. A prototype of a laser calibration instrument has been designed in this study to assist the navigation of wall-climbing robots. The instrument consists of three parts: 1) A laser emission system could emit a laser beam to the curved surface; 2) The automatic rotating motor unit could control and measure the rotation angle α of the laser beam; 3) The exoskeleton is a 3D printed plastic mold. All components are assembled into the exoskeleton as an entirety. An experiment tested the efficiency of the laser calibration instrument. Experiment results show that there is no difference between the theoretical and measured robotic locations, and both theoretical and measured robotic locations are not sensitive to the location change of the laser-based calibration instrument.