INTERNATIONAL ELECTRONIC MACHINES CORPORATION SBIR Phase I Award, September 2018

The degree of corrosion for steel wall enclosures, buildings, tanks, and pipes can be inferred by measuring the thickness of the steel .Standard practice is for inspectors to use hand-held ultrasonic instruments that require the application of a couplant for acceptable measurements.This practice is very slow and laborious.For silos, an autonomous wall climbing system is proposed that uses an EMAT based sensor system, that required no couplant,that is designed for speed and accuracy of measurement.The robot will use magnetic adhesion and be able to circumnavigate silo obstacles such as pipes and ladders, report spatial position, and have machine vision capabilities to make course corrections.