An Optimal Footprint Based Coverage Planning for Hydro Blasting Robots

The hydro blasting of metallic surfaces is an essential maintenance task in various industrial sites. Its requirement of a considerable labour force and time, calls for automating the hydro blasting jobs through mobile robots. A hydro blasting robot should be able to cover the required area for a successful implementation. If a conventional robot footprint is chosen, the blasting may become inefficient, even though the concerned area is completely covered. In this work, the blasting arm's sweeping angle is chosen as the robot's footprint for hydro blasting task, and a multi-objective optimization-based framework is proposed to compute the optimal sweeping arc. The genetic algorithm (GA) methodology is exploited to compute the optimal footprint, which minimizes the blasting time and energy simultaneously. Multiple numerical simulations are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Moreover, the strategy is successfully implemented on our hydro blasting robot named Hornbill, and the efficacy of the proposed approach is validated through experimental trials.