A Wall Climbing Robot for Tank Inspection.

An Autonomous Prototype
Ral Fernndez, Elizabeth Gonzlez, Vicente Feli Dep. de Ingeniera Elctrica, Electrnica y Automtica, E.T.S. Ingenieros Industriales Ciudad Real, UCLM, SPAIN E-mail: {Raul.fernandez, Elisabeth.Gonzalez, Vicente.Feliu}@uclm.es Antonio Gonzlez Rodrguez Dep. de Mecnica Aplicada e Ingeniera de Proyectos, , E.T.S Ingenieros Industriales Ciudad Real, UCLM, SPAIN E-mail: antonio.gozalez@uclm.es

Abstract-This paper describes a solution to a mobile climbing robot on magnetic wheels, designed for inspecting exterior oil tank surfaces made of metal sheets. A mechanical design has been developed which presents a practical solution without an umbilical cord. The inspection system has been developed based on client/server architecture. The robot runs a client application and a remote PC executes the server functions. They will both allow any necessary inspections to be performed simultaneously by more than one robot. A sensorial system and a data fusion strategy to estimate the absolute robot position is proposed to allow the robot to navigate autonomously. The graphical monitoring of the robot position in the remote PC (server application) provides the operator with the possibility of controlling the robot, even in situations in which the operator visibility of an area tank is very low or inexistent. Previous experiments have demonstrated the mechanical systems robustness. These experiments consist of robot trajectory measurements and the comparison to a motion kinematic model.

I.

INTRODUCTION

An increasing interest in the development of special climbing robots has been seen in recent years [5]. This has been motivated by a desire to increase operation efficiency in dangerous environments or difficult-to-access places, and to protect human health and safety when performing hazardous tasks. Climbing robots with the ability to manoeuvre on vertical surfaces are currently in great demand, and are required by various industries [7], and military authorities to perform dangerous operations such as the inspection of highrise buildings, the spray painting and sand blasting of gas tanks [2,3], maintenance of nuclear facilities [11], aircraft inspection, surveillance and reconnaissance, assistance in fire fighting and rescue operations, etc. These capabilities in climbing robots would not only allow them to replace human workers in the carrying out of these dangerous duties but would also eliminate costly scaffolding. One of the most interesting applications of a climbing robot involves steel tank inspection. For example, thousands of storage tanks in oil refineries have to be inspected manually to prevent leakage and/or any other potential catastrophe. A climbing robot applied to oil tank inspection has three main constraints:

1) Autonomy: the robot must navigate itself over the tank surface in a back and forth motion to scan the external wall for the possible faults using sensors without any human intervention 2) Teleoperation: the robot must be guided wirelessly by an operator on the ground to any location of interest 3) No umbilical cord: to prevent problems caused by wires on high walls and welding joints. In specific cases in which the surface allows for it, magnetic attachment may be highly desirable owing to its inherent reliability, although other alternatives exist [6, 8, 9, 10]. The real challenge is to develop a new robot which is capable of working without an umbilical cord in order to preventing problems caused by wires on high walls and welding joints. Tracked robots, such as [4], handle rough terrain very well, but may damage surfaces when turning. Oil tanks usually have a paint cover over their surface, which can be damaged by this kind of robot. Other works have been implemented on wheeled magnetic robots [2, 3] which are used for specific inspection purposes in gas tanks. They are, however, unsuitable for oil tanks. Industrial products such as Tripod [12] have an umbilical power connection. Besides the mechanical implications of designing a climbing robot, a further important issue is the implementation of the navigation platform. The complexity of the robots location in tank oil signifies that most climbing robots are semiautonomous remote controlled systems [14, 15], which reduces the flexibility of the inspection task. Kalra et al. [16] present a climbing autonomous robot using a surface coverage algorithm based on distance transform function to allow it to navigate itself over the tank surface in a back and forth motion to scan the external wall for possible faults using sensors without any human intervention. The drawback of this autonomous robot is the impossibility of developing inspections based on specific tank areas because the robots position is not estimated. This paper presents a prototype of an autonomous robot without an umbilical cord to inspect oil tanks. The mechanical model is based on a wheeled mobile robot with a magnetic attachment to ferromagnetic surfaces whose wheels are designed with tricycle kinematic configuration. The

978-1-4244-5226-2/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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navigation task has been developed through the provision of a set of sensors with which to estimate the robot position, thus allowing autonomous inspection to be performed in specific tank areas. This paper is organized as follows. Section II explains the mechanical design. Section III shows the architecture of the inspection system. In this section, a sensorial system and a data fusion strategy to estimate the robot position is proposed. Some experiments are carried out to test the prototype that is discussed in Section IV. Conclusions and Future Works are presented in the last sections. II.
MECHANICAL DESIGN

On board power supplies are mounted above the inspection system.

The aim is to develop a climbing robot which can take an ultrasonic sensor to every part of the oil tank's surface and will deal with the constraints of a real inspection work space. A. Magnetic Wheels The wheel structure consists of a cylindrical nylon structure in the centre with 12 holes which surround Neodymium-IronBoron magnets, all of which is enclosed in two steel plates in order to conduct the magnetic flux through the surface it is working on. Three rubber o-rings around the nylon structure increase the friction between the wheel and the rolling surface (see Figure 1). The use of small magnets in a nylon structure permits an increase in the wheel radius with a short increase of wheel weight. The wheel diameter is 112 mm and its thickness is 20 mm. The final weight of a magnetic wheel in this configuration is 1 kg. The wheel test is shown in [1].

Fig. 2. CAD representation of robot design

The turning mechanism in a robot is a difficult design problem. A previous design of skid-steer type robots was rejected because the prototype could not turn, as magnetic wheels do not permit the necessary slip for this kind of robots. The design proposed in this paper has solved this problem. The front wheel is the drive wheel, and the tricycle configuration causes the robot follow the direction of the drive wheel. When the robots work space is a fuel tank, it would be very useful to be able turn around a point in order to reach the inspection points more easily. The tricycle configuration allows it to turn around an instantaneous center of rotation (ICR). C. Robot Kinematic The kinematic equation for a robot with the configuration of tricycle is of the form shown in (1) can be found in [13].
x' y' = ' ' sin( ) cos( ) cos( ) cos( ) sin( ) / l 0 0 0 v t 0 1

(1)

Fig. 1. Magnetic wheel structure

where is the angle between the inertial system and the robot frame, is the angle between the drive wheel and the robot frame and l is the distance between the front and rear wheels. y l

B. Robot Configuration The scheme of a tricycle has been conceived for this robot's design. This is composed of three magnetic wheels, each of which is triggered by a motor DC. The total mass of the mechanistic structure is 12kg, to which it is necessary to add the weight of the battery, the sensors and the electronic components, increasing the weight to 23kg. The total size is approximately 800x750x250 mm3. A central area is required to install the inspection system that consists of a Cartesian robot with a rolling ultrasonic sensor. This is composed of three motorized linear guides (see Figure 2). This system allows the robot to cover a high area, making the inspection task faster and reducing its movements with the associated reduction of the involved energy consumption.

Fig. 3. Kinematic Scheme for tricycle system

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The contol variables vt and are the linear velocity and the angular velocity of the robot respectively. III.
NAVEGATION SYSTEM

A. Architecture The robotic inspection system developed is based on client/server architecture. As Figure 3 shows, the client application is related to the climbing robot tasks, while, the server application runs on a remote PC. The two applications are communicated by a wireless network (WLAN Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11g) using TCP/IP protocol. Server
Dataset
User Interface

Client
BATTERIES SENSORS

Broker: The main goal of this module is to interact (command/queries) with the robot. This module also requests information from the robot about its status (position, batteries state) and sends the robot the inspection mode, trajectory, landmarks, etc. Monitor: This provides the operator with a graphical interface with the information about the robots status. Although several applications use the robot as a server, we have decided to make the robot a client, thus making it possible for the inspection system to work simultaneously with more than one robot in the future. The server application has been developed with Visual Studio 2005 for .NET framework using C#. This powerful programming environment allows us to develop complex graphical interfaces, database access and WLAN communication in relative short amounts of time. Client Application

MODE

BROKER

BRAIN

CONTROL

Autonomous Teleoperation MONITOR

ACTUATORS

Fig. 4. Main modules in the Client/Server architecture for the proposed climbing robot

Server Application The server application is focused on configuring the inspection task, and monitoring the robots status and store/visualization of the thickness measures for a tank wall. The tasks/goals of each module are: Dataset: Store tank information such as: tank identification, landmarks, tank plan and the thickness measures history. Mode: Set the application to work in autonomous or teleoperation mode. User Interface: Set up the tank details required by the dataset (tank identification, plan, weld intersections to use as landmarks), configuration of the robot trajectory and areas to inspect in autonomous mode. Figure 5 shows the main panel of the User Interface.

The main tasks to be performed by the client application running at the robot CPU are: to check the status of the robots batteries and to capture the sensor measures, position estimation, trajectory generation, actuator control and server communication. These tasks are developed by means of the modules overviewed below: Batteries: To check the state of the batteries. In the case of low charge an alarm is sent to the Brain module. Sensors: To update the sensor measures. Brain: To communicate with the server application (queries/status report), to estimate the robots position and to control the generation of trajectories. Control: To execute the motor control model Actuators: Motors (hardware) The client application has been develop in LabVIEW. The LabVIEW real-time graphical programming environment simplifies the programming of complex robotics applications by providing a high level of abstraction, and communication with a wide variety of sensors. B. Localization Problem A fundamental task for an autonomous mobile robot is that of localization, i.e., determining its location in a known environment. Absolute localization relies on landmarks, maps, beacons, or satellite signals to determine the robots global position and orientation. Dead-reckoning (open-loop estimation) is commonly used for the estimation of position during path execution. Deadreckoning is often used when wheel encoders are available for drive wheel position measurement. However, errors in kinematic model parameters, wheel slip, or an uneven surface may cause poor position estimates to occur. A worse scenario is one in which poor estimates would cause a collision, thus clogging the robots operation. It is therefore important to

Fig. 5. Main panel of the User Interface where is the robot trajectory to follow during the inspection, is the area to inspect and each intersection between a vertical a horizontal welding( ) is n- used as a landmark.

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minimize errors in estimated position during the path execution phase. Mobile robots use additional sensors to deal with the localization problem. The localization strategies are also based on the use of redundant information from the sensorial system which would lead to data fusion methods. Data fusion should give better results than a single sensor given data error. C. Sensorial System We have also included another four sensors in the wheel encoders: 1) Laser distance meter: Provides information about the distance between the robot and the floor (robot height) 2) Inclinometer: Robot orientation (angle) 3) Welding detector: Tank weld detection 4) Ultrasonic sensors: To avoid obstacles The goal of the three first sensors is to estimate the robots absolute position; ultrasonic sensors are meanwhile required in most navigation systems to deal with obstacle avoidance. Figure 6 shows the sensors used by the robot. In the case of oil tank navigation, several obstacles could appear in the robot trajectory such as stairs, valves, etc. On some occasions an obstacle could affect the sensor measures confidence; for example, the laser distance sensor could report the wrong distance between the robot and the floor if an obstacle (tank piece) is in the way. It is for this reason that redundant information is so important.
Laser distance meter Inclinometer

D. Computing absolute robot position In comparison to other wall climbing robot inspection environments, oil tanks show special features such as welding joins that could be used as landmarks. When the robot passes over a weld, the robot position could therefore be updated. To compute the absolute robot position in the tank, we assume that: The oil tank landmarks are known from the dataset The initial robot position is set up by the operator The robot movements are considered in a vertical planar space (x, y). The coordinate y therefore corresponds with the robot height with regard to the floor, while the x coordinate is the horizontal robot position with regard to the tank coordinate origin. The absolute robot position is computed by developing a data fusion process. The data fusion process takes into consideration the position computed by means of the encoders (odometry) and inclinometer, laser distance meter measures and the well known landmarks. Let P(t) = [ p x (t ), p y (t )] be the absolute robot position at (t ) = [ p the time step t , and P x (t ), p y (t )] be the absolute robot position estimated by mean of the encoder sensor and the inclinometer orientation measure ( (t))

(t ) = P ( t 1) + R ( ) * v t ( t ) * T P cos( ) sin( ) R( ) = sin( ) cos( )

(2) (3)

Soldier detector

DLS-B30

where T is the sampling period, v t ( t ) = [v x ( t ), v y (t )] is the robot velocity v x (t ) (is assumed to be 0) and R ( ) denotes the rotational transformation matrix from the robot to the world coordinate.

Sensorial System
Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse Ultrasonic

Seika NG360 Encoder

HEDL 5540

SRF 08

Fig 6. Sensors used by the sensorial system

In the sensorial system, we would like to highlight the welding detector. At this moment we are using a temporal solution to detect the tank welds. When the robot passes over a weld, the surface variation (weld) causes it to press the mouse wheel, thus storing a new event in the client system. In the next version, the soldier detection sensor will be replaced with a limit switch sensor.

velocity of the left wheel by means of the encoders position variations. We shall denominate as (t ) the distance measured by the ( x (k ), y (k )) a pair of laser distance sensor and coordinates for the k-esime landmark (1 k K , where K is the number of tank landmarks) The data fusion module computes the robot position in the (t ) , (t) and the landmarks. The axis y ( p y (t ) ) by using p last item is used only when a weld has been detected. The goal of the data fusion module is to fix the encoder errors with the laser distance measure, but taking into consideration wrong measures from the laser distance sensor caused by obstacles. Thus, if the current laser distance differs by more (t ) value, the robot position than a threshold 1 to the p (t ) as being the best choice. Another choice is to assumes p update p y (t ) when a horizontal weld is detected, if the

1 (4) ( v er (t ) + v el (t )) 2 where v er (t ) the is the calculated translational velocity of the right wheel and v el (t ) is the calculated translational v y (t ) =

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 (t ) and the landmark closest to the difference between p coordinate y ( k ' ) is less than the threshold, 2 p y (t ) is updated with y ( k ' ) . The robot position in the axis x x (t ) . Only when a weld is p y (t ) is usually estimated with p detected and corresponds to robot clamber is a vertical weld updated by x (k ' ) . The follow pseudo code therefore shows how the robots absolute position is computed by the data fusion strategy. If weld_detection == false (t ) (t )) 1 if abs ( p
y (t ) else p y (t ) = p end
or else k ' =getClosestLandMarkIndex(P(t-1)) If ( y ( k ' ) == (t ) ) or ( y (k ' ) p y (t ) 2) else

p y (t ) = (t )

x (t ) p x (t ) = p

p y (t ) = y ( k ' )

Fig 7. Real prototype in service.

end weld_detection = false end E. Teleoperation The teleoperation task was developed by using the Xbox 360 controller. The server application is able to monitor the current robot position in the tank with a delay of 1 second. This ability provides the operator with the possibility of teleoperating the robot even in situations in which the area visibility is low or inexistent. This feature is an advantage over others teleoperated systems in which the operator has to guide the robot by using visual contact with the interior of the tank. Our system is able to teleoperate the robot by means of monitor information (robot current position over the tank plan). IV.
EXPERIMENTS RESULTS

px (t ) = x (k ' )

Values obtained with Optotrack have been included in Figure 8. Note, therefore, that a trajectory has been obtained from the robot without slides. The value of the simulation and the measured data are very similar.

Optotrack measurement vs kinematic model

1000

Optotrack measurement Kinematic model

800

600

Y position(mm)

400

200

One of the principal problems that may appear when constructing a climbing robot is the appearance of slide on the vertical surface during navigation. In order to demonstrate the good behavior of the prototype, some motion capture measures have been made on the robots trajectory. Tracking has been accomplished with Qualisys Optotrack system. The kinematic model of the robot, presented in the equation in Section II (1), is compared with the measures achieved by motion capture system The kinematics equations have been introduced in Simulink and values to accomplish the desired trajectory have been assigned to vt and . The results are shown in Figure 7. 6 kg have been added to the robot in order to study its behavior in a similar situation to that of the real world in which the inspection equipment will add some weight to the robot (see Figure 7).

-200 -100

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

X position(mm)

Fig 8. Optotrack Meausure vs kinematic model simulation

The trajectory generated in the simulation of the kinematic model makes it move across the center of mass of the robot, which is placed in the Instantaneous Center of Rotation (ICR) (see Figure 9). The measurements of the trajectory have not allowed an element to be placed to track in the ICR of the real robot, and the measure that is shown with the motion capture system therefore has a deviation that can be appraised in Figure 9 when the robot turns.

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a)

b)

Fig 9. Differences in the trajectory for 2 points inside the robot. a) Robot turning seen from measurement point, b) Robot turning seen from ICR

V. CONCLUSIONS This paper presents an autonomous climbing robot prototype for the non-destructive inspection of oil storage tanks. The proposed prototype cofiguration has been developed with the capability of climbing up steel walls and navigating welding lines. The remote inspection system has been illustrated. A sensorial system and data fusion strategy to estimate the absolute robot position have been proposed. This allows the robot to navigate autonomously. The mechanical system has demonstrated the capabilities to track an accurate trajectory which is given by the defined kinematic equations. VI. FUTURE WORKS As future works, we suggest adding a vision sensor. This sensor will be a passive sensor with the goal of providing the operator with more information about the amount of wall tank conditions to help in the visual inspection of tank parts such as valves, etc. during the teleoperation. Another goal to evaluate is the accuracy during the estimation of the absolute robot position. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This paper was sponsored by REPSOL and by the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). REFERENCES
[1] [2] [3] R. Fernandez, A. Gonzalez, V. Feliu, A proposed wall climbing robot for oil tank inspection, in Int. Conference in Climbing and Walking Robots (Coimbra, Portugal, 2008). W. Fischer, F. Tche, R. Siegwart, Magnetic Wall Climbing Robot for Thin Surface with Specific Obtacle, in Int. Conference of Field and Service Robot, (Chamonix, France, 2007). W. Fischer, F. Tche, R. Siegwart, Inspection System for Very Thin and Fragile Surfaces, Based on a Pair of Wall Climbing Robots with Magnetic Wheels, in Int. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, (San Diego, USA, 2007). W. Shen, J. Gu, Y. Shen, Permanent Magnetic System Desing for wall climbing robot, in Int. Conference on Mechatronics Automation, (Niagara Falls, Canada, 2005). C. Balaguer, G. Virk, M. Armada, Robot Applications Against Gravity, in IEEE Robotics Automation Magazine, Vol. 13, Issue 1, March 2006, pp. 5-6. D. Longo, G. Muscato, Alicia Climbing Robot: a Three-module Robot for Automatic Wall Inspection, in IEEE Robotics Automation Magazine, Vol. 13, Issue 1, March 2006, pp. 42-50.

[7] H. Slocum, S. Awtar, J. Hart, Magnebot: Magnetic Wheels Based Overhead Tranportation Concept, in Int. Federation of Automatic Control, (Barcelona, Spain, 2002). [8] B. Luk, D. Cooke, S. Galt Intelligent legged climbing service robot for remotemaintenance applications in hazardous environments, in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, June 2006, pp. 141-152. [9] G. La Rosa, M. Mesina, G. Muscato, R. Sinatra, A low-cost lightweight climbingrobot for the inspection of vertical surfaces, in Mechatronics, 2002, pp. 71-96. [10] Y. Zhang, A. Nishi, Low-presure air motor for wall-climbing robot actuation, in Mechatronics, 2003, pp. 377-392. [11] L. Briones, P. Bustamante, M. Serna, ROBICEN: A wall-climbing robot for inspection in nuclear power plants, in Robotic ComputerIntegrated Manufacturing,Vol. 11, No. 4, 1994, pp. 287-292. [12] Jireh Industries LTD, Tripod - a Revolution in Remote Tranportation; Industrial Product http://www.jireh-industries.com. [13] Anibal Ollero Robtica: manipuladores y robots mviles Marcombo 2001 [14] Weimin Shen and Jason Gu Yanjun Shen. Proposed Wall Climbing Robot with Permanent Magnetic Tracks for Inspecting Oil Tanks. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics & Automation, Vol.4, July 2005 pp. 2072-2077. [15] W Yan, L Shuliang, X Dianguo, Z Yanzheng, S Hao, G. Development and application of wall-climbing robots IEEE International Conference in Robotics and Automation, Vol.2, 10-15 May 1999, pp.1207-1212. [16] Love P. Kalra, Jason Gu, Max Meng, "A Wall Climbing Robot for Oil Tank Inspection," Robotics and Biomimetics, IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1523-1528, 2006

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