Automated Structural Health Monitoring & Robotic Stress Testing Platform

An industrial-grade testing suite that synchronizes robotic actuators with real-time piezoresistive sensor telemetry to detect early material failure.

Developed during my Engineering Internship at Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY).

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📷 Demo

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🚀 Project Overview

This project solves the problem of manual, inconsistent material stress testing. It creates a closed-loop automated system where a desktop application controls a 6-axis robot arm to apply precise force while simultaneously recording high-speed sensor data.

The system decouples data ingestion from visualization using multi-threading, ensuring that heavy CSV logging (O(1) circular buffers) never freezes the UI.

⚡ Key Features

🤖 Robotic Automation (Control Plane)

• Universal Robot Integration: Uses urx and TCP/IP (Port 30002) to control UR-Series robot arms.
• Automated Cycles: Performs "Stress-Relax" testing loops with configurable dwell times, velocity, and acceleration.
• Safety protocols: Immediate stop commands and joint-limit checks implemented in Python.

📊 Real-Time Visualization (Data Plane)

• High-Speed Plotting: Renders live sensor waveforms and 2D heatmaps using CustomTkinter and Matplotlib.
• Non-Blocking Architecture: Separation of concerns between the Serial Worker Thread (Data Acquisition) and the Main GUI Thread (Rendering).
• Serial Command Interface: Custom ASCII-based protocol to configure ESP32 sampling rates and states on the fly.

💾 Optimization

• Circular Buffering: Implemented O(1) fixed-size buffers for telemetry storage, preventing memory bloat during long tests.
• Thread-Safe Logging: Asynchronous writing to CSV files for post-process analysis in MATLAB/Excel.

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🛠️ System Architecture

1. Host Application (Python): The brain of the operation. Runs the GUI, manages the robot connection (Ethernet), and talks to the sensors (USB-UART).
2. Actuator (Universal Robot): Receives motion commands via TCP/IP.
3. Sensor Node (ESP32): Runs MicroPython firmware to sample piezoresistive arrays and stream packets to the Host.

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💻 Tech Stack

• Language: Python 3.9+
• GUI Libraries: CustomTkinter (Dashboard), PyQt5 (Robot Control Panel)
• Robotics: urx (Universal Robot Python Library)
• Communication: pyserial (UART), socket (TCP/IP)
• Data Handling: numpy, pandas