In order to support the continued trend of increased use of composite materials especially in aviation, efficient testing systems need to be developed. The anisotropic material properties of composites allow for high specific stiffnesses and strengths. However, some failure modes in composite structures cannot be identified through visual inspection and to ensure the health of the structures, a time-consuming and costly inspection approach must be taken. Often, this approach includes disassembly and premature part replacements. Thus, complete nondestructive inspection (NDI) and monitoring of composite structures in aviation is virtually nonexistent. Hence, there is a need to introduce an autonomous inspection method to reduce time and cost, while increasing aircraft reliability. To this end, several recent advancements of a mobile robotic platform and related algorithms for Lamb wave-based inspection of aircraft surfaces are presented here. The robots are envisioned to be operated in a low cardinality swarm, where each robot employs guided ultrasound technology to collaboratively inspect plate-like components. For the purpose of implementing a fully autonomous platform, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods are combined with Lamb wave-based NDI techniques. Specifically, it is demonstrated that a novel Lamb wave-based edge seeking and tracing methodology can contribute to increasing testing efficiency, with the overarching goal of creating a full map of the tested structure including all potential flaws.
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