Investigation of Non-circular Scanning Trajectories in Robot-based Industrial X-ray Computed Tomography of Multi-material Objects

In this work the application of six-axis robots for robot-based industrial X-ray computed tomography (CT) imaging is investigated. In contrast to classical Cartesian manipulators with a turntable used in industrial cone-beam CT, robots offer increased flexibility regarding scanning trajectories. The increased flexibility with respect to scanning trajectories helps to gather highly informative content from alternative ray paths for a high-quality 3D reconstruction of the object to be scanned. Using numerical simulations we show that this additional informations increase the image quality of a CT scan of a multi-material measuring object, consisting of tantalum spheres and a carbon structure.