"Crown Inspection Mobile Platform (CIMP)"

1998

Driven wheel trucks (fore/aft)
Vertical carriage (port/starbord)
Sensor pod (with rotation)
Miniature Stereoscopic Camera
Wireless operation

Concept: Mel Siegel, Steve George
Mechanical Design: Gregg Podnar
Electrical Design: Gregg Podnar
Wireless Control: Gregg Podnar
Immense assistance: Alan Guisewite

CIMP operator with remote control and stereoscopic viewing station.
Miniature stereoscopic camera can be seen in sensor pod, with adjustable lighting.

Inspectors reviewing flaw found using CIMP.
After this 747 had been completely inspected for its scheduled Heavy Maintenance,
CIMP allowed inspectors to do an additional stereoscopic visual inspection of the crown.
This remote inspection discovered two additional flaws, each of which were scheduled for repair.

More Details

Publications:
Robotic Assistants for Aircraft Inspectors (22 pages, PDF 441K)
    Instrumentation and Measurement Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, March, 1998.
    SME's Robotics Today, Vol., 11, No. 2, second quarter 1998.
    MCB University Press's Industrial ROBOT , Vol. 25, No. 6, 1998
    1999 Literati Club, Award for Excellence
Enhanced Remote Visual Inspection of Aircraft Skin (12 pages, PDF 198K)
    Proc. of the Intelligent NDE Sciences for Aging and Futuristic Aircraft Workshop, 1997.
Remote Inspection Technologies for Aircraft Skin Inspection (10 pages, PDF 1.4M)
    IEEE Workshop on Emergent Technologies and Virtual Systems for Instrumentation and Measurement, 1997.
Image Understanding Algorithms for Remote Visual Inspection of Aircraft Surfaces (12 pages, PDF 1.5M)
    Proc. SPIE Vol. 3029, pp. 2 - 13, Machine Vision Applications in Industrial Inspection V.
Image Enhancement and Understanding for Remote Visual Inspection of Aircraft Surface (12 pages, PDF, 1.2M)
    Proc. SPIE Vol. 2945, pp. 416 - 427, Nondestructive Evaluation of Aging Aircraft, Airports, and Aerospace Hardware, 1996.

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