A Novel Radius Measurement Method for Vertical Oil Tank Based on Laser Tracking and Wall-Climbing Robot.

In order to address the issue of low efficiency and poor accuracy in measuring the radius of large vertical oil tanks, a novel measurement method based on the combination of laser tracking and wall-climbing robot was proposed in this manuscript. To solve the problem of light interruption during the laser tracking measurement process, an active spherically mounted retroreflector (SMR) device that can automatically align the laser was designed. A wall-climbing robot equipped with the active target and temperature sensor was developed to crawl on the tank wall and collect four-dimensional point cloud data. And a self-written program based on the PCL point cloud processing library was adopted to fit and calculate the tank plate radius. Furthermore, multiple measurements were carried out on a vertical oil tank with a capacity of 1000 m3, and the average radius error was only 1.39 mm, which strongly verified the repeatability and feasibility of the method proposed in this manuscript. This method provides a more effective and accurate method for measuring the radius of oil tanks, and it is foreseeable that it will be a good supplement to existing methods.