Wall-climbing robot for visual and GPR inspection

Abstract

This paper presents the design and validates of a wall-climbing robot with the ability to do nondestructive inspection and remote motion control ability. The designed robot is able to have a 31.62 Kg payload with only 50% power on the flat surface, and the robot is able to be controlled through an Android device wirelessly with visual feedback. In order to perform nondestructive inspection, the wall-climbing robot mounts an RGB-D camera and a ground penetration radar, thus it can perform both external visual crack and spall inspection as well as internal defects inspection. Also, a 3D metric inspection is performed via using the RGB-D camera to do visual positioning onboard to couple the measurement from camera and ground penetration radar. Experiments verified the climbing capabilities as well as our novel remote approach to do visual monitoring and control. We also detail the training and the comparative inspection of our DefectNet and FCN-8s, and the results show that our network can perform crack detection.