ROMA: a climbing robot for inspection operations

There has been an increasing interest in developing and employing special robots in construction in order to assist the human operator as well as to limit the damage caused to him. For this end, the ROMA robot, a specially developed self-supported robot has been built. The robot is designed to perform 3D complex movements and navigate through metallic structures using the "caterpillar" concept. The control and monitoring of the robot is achieved through an advanced graphical user interface (GUI), to allow an effective and user friendly operation of the robot with a minimum operator training. The GUI has been designed with an open and modular structure allowing future reusability and scalability when necessary. This paper describes the design of the ROMA robot with a special emphasis on its GUI.