ROSI: A Novel Robotic Method for Belt Conveyor Structures Inspection Belt conveyors play an essential role in the transportation of dry bulk material in different industries. Inspecting conveyor belts structures and its components, such as idlers rolls, is a fundamental task to guarantee the proper production flow. Traditionally, these are cognitive inspections based on sound and vision. In this paper we describe a novel procedure to inspect belt conveyor structures with a robotic device. The system is composed by (i) a mobile platform capable of moving in different terrains, overcoming obstacles and traversing stairs with different slopes, (ii) a robotic manipulator with six degrees of freedom, and (iii) a set of sensors including microphone, accelerometers, laser, and cameras. Preliminary field tests validated the proposed system for mining operations allowing the identification of enhancements regarding platform mobility and control strategy. Based on the kinematic model, we present a control method to command both the mobile platform and robotic manipulator considering the robotic device as a wholebody system. The strategy is validated through simulations using ROS and VREP.

Development of a Steel Bridge Climbing Robot Motivated by a high demand for automated inspection of civil infrastructure, this work presents an efficient design and development of a tanklike robot for structural health monitoring. Unlike most existing magnetic wheeled mobile robot designs, which may be suitable for climbing on flat steel surface, our proposed tanklike robot design uses reciprocating mechanism and rollerchains to make it capable of climbing on different structural shapes (e.g., cylinder, cube) with coated or noncoated steel surfaces. The developed robot is able to pass through the joints and transition from one surface to the other (e.g., from flat to curving surfaces). Taking into account several strict considerations (including tight dimension, efficient adhesion and climbing flexibility) to adapt with various shapes of steel structures, a prototype tanklike robot integrating multiple sensors (halleffects, sonars, inertial measurement unit, Eddy current and cameras), has been developed. Rigorous analysis of robot kinematics, adhesion force, sliding failure and turnover failure has been conducted to demonstrate the stability of the proposed design. Mechanical and magnetic force analysis together with slidingturnover failure investigation can serve as an useful framework for designing various steel climbing robots in the future. The robot is integrated with cameras and Eddy current sensor for visual and indepth fatigue crack inspection of steel structures. Experimental results and field deployments confirm the adhesion, climbing, inspection capability of the developed robot.