Motion Planning and Image Capturing for Robotic Inspection of a Curved Surface Subject to Imaging Constraints

Abstract

Quality Control is an important step in manufacturing of machine parts especially for complex, customized parts for safety critical systems like airplane engines. Visual Inspection by humans is one of the modalities used for this purpose, but it limited in many ways. Inspectors need months of training, need to maintain tremendous focus for a long duration, and are required to keep up with the growing pace of manufacturing. It is thus imperative to automate this process. This thesis proposes a methodology for automated inspection by using a commercial robot arm (Universal Robots UR5e), describes elements of the solution, and evaluates its efficacy – pertaining to complex metallic parts with characteristics similar to components of a jet engine. Furthermore, this thesis also explores a potential improvement to the automated inspection process which implements a mesh segmentation algorithm and attempts to generalize the custom solution.