Autonomous double-hull welding robot prototype

Overview

Welding the double-hull blocks of a commercial merchant vessel means working inside a confined, obstacle-filled structure. Getting a welding manipulator to the seam is the hard part of automating it.

I designed and built a prototype autonomous robot to weld ship hulls for commercial merchant vessels. I then tested the design’s movements across that environment to confirm it could travel where the work is.

Alongside the mechanism, I developed a frame-to-frame real-time odometry estimator. It uses the Normal Distributions Transform for scan matching on data from a Velodyne VLP-16.

The mobility design work became a paper in the Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. The Link button above goes to that paper.

Tools

Normal Distributions Transform, Velodyne VLP-16, mechanism design and prototyping.