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arXiv · 2404.12785

AutoInspect: Towards Long-Term Autonomous Industrial Inspection

Michal Staniaszek·Tobit Flatscher·Joseph Rowell·Hanlin Niu·Wenxing Liu·Yang You·Robert Skilton·Maurice Fallon·Nick Hawes
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Abstract

We give an overview of AutoInspect, a ROS-based software system for robust and extensible mission-level autonomy. Over the past three years AutoInspect has been deployed in a variety of environments, including at a mine, a chemical plant, a mock oil rig, decommissioned nuclear power plants, and a fusion reactor for durations ranging from hours to weeks. The system combines robust mapping and localisation with graph-based autonomous navigation, mission execution, and scheduling to achieve a complete autonomous inspection system. The time from arrival at a new site to autonomous mission execution can be under an hour. It is deployed on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot using a custom sensing and compute payload called Frontier. In this work we go into detail of the system's performance in two long-term deployments of 49 days at a robotics test facility, and 35 days at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor in Oxfordshire, UK.

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Michal Staniaszek, Tobit Flatscher, Joseph Rowell, Hanlin Niu, Wenxing Liu, Yang You, Robert Skilton, Maurice Fallon, Nick Hawes. 2024-04-19. AutoInspect: Towards Long-Term Autonomous Industrial Inspection. https://doi.org/10.1109/tfr.2025.3586831

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