The Centre for Automated and Robotic Non-Destructive Testing

The Centre was established in 1992 to research and develop inspection robots and NDT techniques to [1,2]:
• Bring automation to the NDT task to eliminate errors caused by human operators due to fatigue on jobs that require a great deal of inspection in difficult environmental conditions.
• Improve defect detection by using the ability of robotics to improve sensor probe positioning accuracy and repeatability and use the programmable flexibility of robots to optimally deploy a wide variety of sensor probes and inspection techniques.
• Reduce the cost of performing the inspection by using wall climbing and mobile robots that provide access to test sites that are remotely located on large structures and/or in hazardous environments and hence not easily accessible to humans.
• Reduce costs substantially by performing in-service NDT with robotic deployment of sensor probes thereby eliminating outage costs and production losses.
• Reducing capital equipment costs by developing compact multi-function inspection robots that can flexibly perform a variety of different NDT tasks on different sites. Thus the robots should be readily transportable between different sites, be able to move over floors, change surfaces and climb walls, ceilings and other structures of variable curvature whilst carrying a payload of NDT sensors that can scan test surfaces by deployment with multi-axis arms.