RoboCT – Application for in-situ Inspection of Join Technologies of large scale Objects

In sophisticated mechanical engineering like e.g. automobile industry, the reliability of joints like rivets, screws or adhesive bonding is usually being examined by regularly repeated destructive testing of these manufactured parts. At full scale, this implies disassembling whole car bodies so far that e.g. all adhesive bondings are being forcibly opened so that the geometry of these joints can be assessed. Whilst X-ray CT is one established means of NDT applied to cutout specimens in the laboratories of such manufacturers, it is only beginning to become available to full scale objects since few years. Over more than one decade, EZRT has developed the technology of RoboCT the application of cooperating industrial robots as large and highly flexible manipulation system for the X-ray components. In 2018, we have taken into operation the very first such system in the field in BMW's prototype plant. This system of four cooperating robots is designed to address large automobile components, whole car bodies or even fully assembled cars and shall help to reduce the time to market of new models. In this contribution, we introduce the technology and its first implementation in production environment. We demonstrate the exemplary application of RoboCT to different join technologies.