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Mooring systems experience high tidal waves, storms and harsh environmental conditions. Therefore, ensuring the integrity of mooring chain is important. The aim of the work reported in this paper is to develop a robotic system that performs in-service non-destructive testing of mooring chains. The inspection system is an autonomous device that operates in air as well as underwater. The permanent magnet adhesion crawler robot developed can climb mooring chains at a speed of 42cm/minute with a pay load of 50N. FEA study of the magnetic adhesion module, structural analysis, prototyping and testing of the robot is presented in this paper.

This paper describes a method for removing of obstacles in the images by multiple cameras. Acquiring information of remote location is needed to operate robots. For example, an image by camera is effective in remote control. However, there is a problem that images from camera on front of FMT are hindered by the FMT’s crawler. To use them as image for control, removal of crawler in the images is necessary. The proposed method generates the images without crawler by multiple cameras and image processing. Then the method uses edge and difference between some images to detect crawler. We confirmed the availability of the proposed method by experiments.

A rescue robot with crawler has few camera spaces. Our purpose is development how to create the space inside the crawler belt. However it makes robot vision’s image fragmentation to attach inside the cameras such the space. Our previous report showed that a patching method can generate complete image by using two cameras. This paper describes additional method based on brightness changes to solve a low-light problem. Experimented result shows that the method is effective.

The covered area detection method, using the brightness change in an image and parallax correction, does not depend on a common field of vision. Camera images become important information when a rescue robot is operate by remote control, but mounting cameras is difficult on a rescue robot crawler that must get into cracks in rubble. We propose attaching cameras behind the crawler shoe. The biggest problem then, however, is that the shoe obstructs large parts of the camera image. To avoid this, we developed real-time image processing that complements the obstructed area through the use of two cameras. We then performed evaluation experiments to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique. The complement method can solve in a case of one parallax problem. However, several objects in a acquiring image occurs several parallaxes between objects. In this paper, we report a trial to solve the parallaxes problem by using a user interface software.