AutoInspect: Towards Long-Term Autonomous Industrial Inspection

TL;DR

AutoInspect is a ROS-based autonomous inspection system successfully deployed across diverse industrial environments, demonstrating robust long-term operation, rapid site setup, and comprehensive mission execution capabilities.

Contribution

The paper introduces AutoInspect, a versatile, long-term autonomous inspection system with detailed deployment results in industrial and fusion reactor settings.

Findings

Autonomous mission execution can be initiated within an hour of site arrival.

System operated continuously for 49 and 35 days in different environments.

Demonstrated robustness and adaptability across diverse industrial scenarios.

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.