Name of the project: CIRUS
Company: Vicinay Cadenas
VICINAY CADENAS is a leading manufacturer of mooring chains and their accessories. These products are subjected to very harsh conditions and have to accomplish with the strictest quality controls. Our research team has designed a robot to perform automatically the ultrasonic inspection of the welding plane of the stud-less links.
One of the main objectives has been to get a versatile equipment in order to be able to check a wide range of chain diameters. Commercial solutions for cylindrical bodies have been founds, but none of them can be easily adjusted to this application. The welding plane to be inspected is in the middle of one of the chain arms and it is a circular surface. The inspection procedure requires the following sensor movements – an alternating linear movement in the direction of the generatrix and a circular movement along the directrix. The kinematic structure of the robot has been divided into three subsystems – one for global positioning, one for local positioning and one for inspection.
