Remote surface inspection system

Abstract Hayati, S., Balaram, J., Seraji, H., Kim, W.S. and Tso, K.S., Remote surface inspection system. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 11 (1993) 45–59. This paper reports on an on-going research and development effort in remote surface inspection of space platforms such as the Space Station Freedom. It describes the space environment and identifies the types of damage for which to search. The paper provides an overview of the Remote Surface Inspection System that has been developed at JPL to conduct proof-of-concept demonstrations and to perform experiments in a laboratory environment. Specifically, the paper describes three technology areas: (1) manipulator control for sensor placement, (2) automated non-contact inspection to detect and classify flaws, and (3) operator interface to command the system interactively and receive raw or processed sensor data. Initial findings for the automated and human visual inspection tests are reported.