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.
@article{arxiv.2404.12785,
title = {AutoInspect: Towards Long-Term Autonomous Industrial Inspection},
author = {Michal Staniaszek and Tobit Flatscher and Joseph Rowell and Hanlin Niu and Wenxing Liu and Yang You and Robert Skilton and Maurice Fallon and Nick Hawes},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.12785},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Accepted to the IEEE ICRA Workshop on Field Robotics 2024