A mobile inspection platform for hard-to-reach filter banks

Large filter banks in industrial plant rooms are inspected one cell at a time, at awkward heights, down aisles with very little room to turn. Positioning the instrument by hand is slow, physically demanding and — because every operator does it slightly differently — inconsistent between inspections. This project builds the machine that does the positioning instead.

The machine

• A Mecanum-wheel chassis, so the platform can crab sideways and rotate on the spot in an aisle far too narrow for a conventional steered base.
• A two-stage lift covering 0.15 m to 2.5 m — floor-level cells and the top of the bank from the same machine.
• A vertical XY scanning stage with at least 700 × 700 mm of travel, carrying the customer’s inspection instrument on a purpose-designed mount.
• Industrial PC and motion controller, six millimetre-wave radar sensors, an alignment camera, a 360° pan-tilt camera, limit and home switches, an emergency-stop circuit, power modules and a physical handheld remote.

Software that keeps the operator in charge

The control software runs locally on the platform. It handles task configuration, manual, semi-automatic and automatic motion, camera-assisted alignment, live sensor monitoring with collision avoidance, data logging of coordinates, readings and imagery, alarm handling, and results and log export. Remote monitoring was consciously left as an interface stub — bringing it into this phase would have added cost without adding capability the customer needed on day one.

Delivered as a working prototype

Everything is assembled, wired, deployed and factory tested in our own workshop, so the platform arrives in a known-good state rather than as a box of parts. The handover covers the machine itself, software and source, mechanical assembly and electrical schematic drawings, operating and maintenance manuals, and the factory test report.