Swerve Drive Autonomous Robot for Tiles Thermographic Inspection

Quality inspection of buildings is a task that can be tedious and prone to human errors, so the use of autonomous mobile robots is very attractive. In this work, a swerve drive mobile robot is proposed for tile hollowness inspection using an active thermographic approach. It integrates a hot air blower as heating source and an infrared thermal camera to observe the hollow region contour, which is the result of the characteristics of the thermal diffusion process in different media. In addition, image processing techniques were used to segment the hollow region contour. As a result, an automatic, fast and effective inspection strategy is proposed.