Design of weld inspection system for intersected pipe based on redundant manipulator

摘要

A robotic system was designed for the pipe intersected weld inspection. The manipulator can be hung on a branch pipe and rotates 360° according to a split pipe clamp device. The required inspection trajectory of the inspection probe on the manipulator's end-detector is finalized by using the redundancy joints. The robotic system has two inspection modes. One is the 360° circumferential inspection with different scanning radii. The other is the 'Z' shape inspection along the radial direction. The robotic system can perform intersected weld inspection when the radius range of the branch pipe and the inspected pipe are 100～400 mm and 600～1 000 mm,respectively. The results of the analysis of the designed system architecture and the operation under control algorithm show that the inspection accuracy of the robotic system can be: circumferential stepping accuracy≤0.2 mm/m, radial stepping accuracy≤0.5 mm/m, and axial stepping accuracy≤1 mm/mm.