Crocells robot

Climbing Cooperating Robots for Fast and Flexible Manufacturing of Large Scale Engineering Structures

The CROCELLS system consists of 4 cooperating robots, (i) the welding vehicle which carries a precision welding arm with three degrees of movement, two linear and one rotational and a laser seam tracker. (ii) the weld utilities vehicle carrying the weld wire drum and feed mechanism (iii) the NDT vehicle which monitors in real time the quality of the weld melt at the instant of its creation as well as performing cold weld inspection, both by means of a state of the art ultrasonic phased array system (iv) a tug robot which when required provides auxiliary propulsion power for the welding vehicle, which bears the heaviest payload.

The climbing tug robot is has not on board payload in order to maximise its pulling force on external objects. It is controlled by a tele-operated system through an umbilical service cable of 8 m length. The size of the tug robot is 500 mm by 450 mm and a height of 150 mm with 30 mm air gab to overcome obstacles, such as weld caps, mainly made in aluminium. The robot is using 18 very strong neodymium permanent magnets, which gives a high payload pulling capability at 20 mm air gap. it makes angular transitions between surfaces of 120 to 180°. The robot weight is 25 kg and it can provide nearly 50 kg of extra pulling force in a vertical position.

Countries & Year

England, Frace, Italy, Greece - 2009

Authors

Hernando Leon-Rodriguez
Bryan Bridge
Tariq Sattar