A Smart Robotic System for Industrial Plant Supervision

TL;DR

This paper presents an autonomous robotic system designed for industrial plant supervision that can detect gas leaks, recognize anomalies, map environments, and navigate safely in complex industrial settings.

Contribution

The paper introduces an integrated robotic system with advanced sensors and intelligent data processing for comprehensive industrial plant monitoring and safety assurance.

Findings

Robust autonomous navigation in a wastewater plant.

Effective detection of methane leaks and gas anomalies.

Successful environment mapping and obstacle avoidance.

Abstract

In today's chemical plants, human field operators perform frequent integrity checks to guarantee high safety standards, and thus are possibly the first to encounter dangerous operating conditions. To alleviate their task, we present a system consisting of an autonomously navigating robot integrated with various sensors and intelligent data processing. It is able to detect methane leaks and estimate its flow rate, detect more general gas anomalies, recognize oil films, localize sound sources and detect failure cases, map the environment in 3D, and navigate autonomously, employing recognition and avoidance of dynamic obstacles. We evaluate our system at a wastewater facility in full working conditions. Our results demonstrate that the system is able to robustly navigate the plant and provide useful information about critical operating conditions.