Dual-Platform Mobile Robotic Approach to Large-Volume Coordinate Metrology

Abstract

Two coordinated mobile robots inspecting large, complex aerospace and defence components: a long-range platform handling global localisation, thermal imaging and coarse dimensional measurement, and a short-range platform doing high-resolution 3D scanning and surface defect characterisation. The hard part, and the paper's main contribution, is a localisation and calibration methodology that keeps measurements consistent as the platforms move – external tracking, scan-to-CAD alignment and scan-to-scan registration combined so that multi-scale geometric and thermal data can be fused. A digital-twin workflow guides platform positioning and optimises the inspection sequence through repeated relocations, letting the system trade scan speed against resolution rather than fixing that compromise in advance.