Development of a Robotic Arm Control Platform for Ultrasonic Testing Inspection in Remanufacturing

Remanufacturing improves sustainability in manufacturing industry by reducing the use of new components. As a key process of remanufacturing, inspection is responsible for evaluating the state of key components for future remanufacturing plans. For inspecting the non-working equipment waiting for further operations, non-destructive testing (NDT), such as ultrasonic testing (UT), is the optimal method to use. Currently, most UT is implemented manually, which is not stable on accuracy due to environmental and human factors. To tackle this issue, an automatic NDT inspection implemented with a robotic arm control platform was proposed. It is still challenging how to implement robotic inspection more effectively and efficiently. To ensure the implementation of the manipulation, simulation should be executed firstly, the implementation in the real world is made subsequently. A control platform based on robot operating system (ROS) was developed for simulation and experiment of robotic inspection. A monocular camera was used to reconstruct the object to plan paths for the robotic arm. Contact force control was used to improve the accuracy of autonomous scanning. The platform was tested in simulation environment and implemented in the real world.