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With the dramatically increasing number of substations, robots are expected to inspect equipment in the power industry. However, a traditional robotic system cannot work stably because of the strong electromagnetic field in substation. The purpose of this paper is to present a robust and stable robotic system for inspecting the substation equipment without the involvement of workers.

The paper presents in detail a robotic system that consists of a monitor center and a robot. With the monitor center, the workers could send inspection tasks and monitor status of the robot timely. Once a fault is detected, the alarm message will flash immediately to remind the workers. The patrol mode of the robot comprises teleoperation, regular inspection, special inspection and a key return mode. The robot only relies on a low-cost magnetic sensor for lateral positioning and radio frequency identification technology for longitudinal positioning when working under patrol mode. At each stop point, the substation equipment can be recognized quickly through accurate matching with the template image stored in the database.

It is shown that the robot could work efficiently and reliably in power substations. The positioning error is proved to be within 5 mm, compared to that of 20 cm by implementing integrated global positioning system-dead reckoning navigation. Because of the high positioning accuracy, it is much easier to recognize the substation equipment. It is observed that nearly 99 per cent of equipments can be recognized.

The proposed robotic system is tested in a simple substation environment. While the proposed system shows satisfactory positioning results, further studies considering changeable weather condition will focus on improving the equipment recognition rate in such environment, such as rainy, snowy and strong sunlight.

The key contribution of this paper is that it provides a robotic system to inspect substation equipment instead of workers, to improve working efficiency and to reduce manpower cost.

This paper presents a robotic system to inspect substation equipment instead of workers. Four patrol modes are designed to meet the inspection demand. Comparing with the previous robotic systems, this system contributes to higher position accuracy and higher equipment recognition rate.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the uses of robots in the nuclear power industry, with an emphasis on newer developments and applications.

Following an introduction to the nuclear industry, this paper considers robotic applications in two areas: test and inspection and decommissioning. A range of products, applications and case histories are discussed.

It is shown that robots are used widely for test and inspection and decommissioning tasks. The majority are highly specialised and are frequently produced by specialist nuclear engineering companies. The main robotic test and inspection techniques are visual inspection, ultrasonics and eddy current and the use of robots reflects both the need to minimise operator exposure to radiation and the frequent difficulties in accessing critical components such as pressure vessel welds and steam generator tubes. Key decommissioning uses include handling and size reduction of contaminated materials, cutting and demolition.

This paper provides details of inspection and decommissioning robots in the nuclear power industry.

Periodic inspection of large tonnage vessels is critical to assess integrity and prevent structural failures that could have catastrophic consequences for people and the environment. Currently, inspection operations are undertaken by human surveyors, often in extreme conditions. This paper aims to present an innovative system for the automatic visual inspection of ship hull surfaces, using a magnetic autonomous robotic crawler (MARC) equipped with a low-cost monocular camera.

MARC is provided with magnetic tracks that make it able to climb along the vertical walls of a vessel while acquiring close-up images of the traversed surfaces. A homography-based structure-from-motion algorithm is developed to build a mosaic image and also produce a metric representation of the inspected areas. To overcome low resolution and perspective distortion problems in far field due to the tilted and low camera position, a “near to far” strategy is implemented, which incrementally generates an overhead view of the surface, as long as it is traversed by the robot.

This paper demonstrates the use of an innovative robotic inspection system for automatic visual inspection of vessels. It presents and validates through experimental tests a mosaicking strategy to build a global view of the structure under inspection. The use of the mosaic image as input to an automatic corrosion detector is also demonstrated.

This paper may help to automate the inspection process, making it feasible to collect images from places otherwise difficult or impossible to reach for humans and automatically detect defects, such as corroded areas.

This paper provides a useful step towards the development of a new technology for automatic visual inspection of large tonnage ships.

Aircraft flight pressurization/depressurization cycling causes the skin to inflate and deflate, stressing it around the rivets that fasten it to the airframe. The resulting strain, exacerbated by corrosion, drives the growth of initially microscopic cracks. To avoid catastrophe, aircraft are inspected periodically for cracks and corrosion. The inspection technology employed is ∼90 percent naked‐eye vision. We have developed and demonstrated robotic deployment of both remote enhanced 3D‐stereoscopic video instrumentation for visual inspection and remote eddy current probes for instrumented inspection. This article describes the aircraft skin inspection application, how robotic deployment may alleviate human performance problems and workplace hazards during inspection, practical robotic deployment systems, their instrumentation packages, and our progress toward developing image enhancement and understanding techniques that could help aircraft inspectors to find cracks, corrosion, and other visually detectable damage.

To ensure the safety of electric power supply, it is necessary to inspect substation equipment. With the dramatic increase in the number of substations, especially indoor substations, intelligent robot inspection has become an important development direction. This paper aims to describe the design of a trackless robot with a robotic arm, which is capable of navigating autonomously and inspecting the equipment in a narrow and complex indoor substation.

A robust four-wheel platform powered by electric motors is used to carry the robot. By fusing multiple-sensor data and visual markers, the robot achieves autonomous movement based on simultaneous localization and mapping. In addition, to accurately obtain the reading of meters located at height or in a narrow space, the robot is equipped with a newly designed visual servo robotic arm.

In practical application, the robot satisfies the requirements of substation inspection, improves work efficiency, saves costs and achieves good results. The robot is also approved by the relevant departments of the State Grid Corporation of China.

After stable operation in a substation for a period of one year, the robot shows high efficiency and stability, meeting the requirements of indoor substation inspection. Meanwhile, the robot greatly promoted the realization of indoor and outdoor integrated substation automatic inspection, and is expected to be further applied in other industrial inspection sites, including mine, tunnel and nuclear power plant.

Due to the complex indoor environment, most of the existing inspection robots are only used outdoors, and there are no good trackless inspection robots for use indoors. The proposed robot is a trackless intelligent inspection robot for use in indoor substations. The robot features a number of important modules, including an autonomous localization and navigation module and a visual servo manipulator module, which can be used in narrow spaces or at height.

This paper aims to review the use of imaging technologies in robotics, with an emphasis on inspection applications and the control of autonomous robots.

Following a brief introduction, this paper first considers vision‐based robotic inspection systems and highlights a selection of recent applications. Second, it considers the use of vision in autonomous robot navigation and discusses some of the challenges and recent developments.

This shows that developments in machine vision have led to vision systems being used in a diversity of component‐level and in‐service robotic inspection tasks. It also illustrates that vision systems have a key role to play in the emerging generation of autonomous, mobile robots.

This paper provides a review of recent developments in vision‐based robotic inspection and autonomous, mobile robot navigation.

This paper aims to present a novel robotic system for airport pavement inspection tasks.

The cloud-edge-terminal-based distributed architecture is designed for the proposed robotic system. Then, the following three major parts are designed and deployed, respectively: Terminal: the wheeled-robot-based data collection system. Edge: remote monitoring and data analysis system. Cloud: shared database center of the inspection data and knowledge.

Validation and application results show that the proposed system satisfies the demands of automated airport pavement inspection tasks and saves the cost of manpower and time.

The proposed system provides a novel solution for the full process of airport pavement inspection. Compared with the traditional manual method, the robotic system can guarantee complete coverage and provide high-precision pavement inspection results with less time and labor costs.

Automatic robots can improve the efficiency of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tank inspection and maintenance, but it is difficult to achieve high-precision spatial positioning and navigation on tank surfaces. The purpose of this paper is to develop a spatial positioning robotic system for tank inspection. The robot can accurately identify and track weld paths. The positioning system can complete robot’s spatial positioning on tank surfaces.

A tank inspection robot with curvature-adaptive transmission mechanisms is designed in this study. A weld path recognition method based on deep learning is proposed to accurately identify and extract weld paths. Integrated multiple sensors, the positioning system is developed to improve the robot’s spatial positioning accuracy. Experiments are conducted on a cylindrical tank to test weld seam tracking accuracy and spatial positioning performance of the robotic system. The practicality of the robotic system is then verified in field tests.

The robot can accurately identify and track weld seams with a maximum drift angle of 4° and a maximum offset distance of ±30 mm. The positioning system has excellent positioning accuracy and stability. The maximum angle and height errors are 3° and 0.08 m, respectively.

The positioning system can improve the autonomous performance of inspection robots and solve the problems of weld path recognition and spatial positioning. Application of the robotic system can promote the automatic inspection and maintenance of LPG tanks.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight on the use of robots in a range of industrial test and inspection applications.

Following a brief introduction, this discusses robotic test and inspection products and practices in the following applications: pipelines, storage tanks, bridges, marine uses, green energy generation and aerospace. Finally, concluding comments are drawn.

This shows that robotic test and inspection practices are being used in a wide range of applications across a diversity of industries. This reflects the many operational and economic benefits arising from their use which include the ability to automate certain laborious manual methods; operation in hazardous locations; uses in inaccessible environments such as within pipelines; the ability to deploy several different techniques simultaneously and thus detect multiple potential defects; reduced workforce costs; and, very often, more rapid testing and greater data acquisition rates than are possible with human operators.

This illustrates the increasingly important role played by robotic technologies in industrial test and inspection practices.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the reviews of past research work on various in-pipe robotic systems and their operations. This investigation has been focussed on the implemented methodologies for performing in-pipe cleaning and inspection tasks.

This work has been concentrated on review of various sensors used in robots to perform in-pipes inspection operation for determining flaws/cracks, corrosion-affected areas, blocks and coated paint thickness. Various actuators like DC motors, servo motors, pneumatic operated and hydraulic operated are discussed in this review analysis to control the motion of various mechanical components of the robot.

In the current analysis, categorisation of various pipe cleaning robots according to their mechanical structure has been addressed. A lot of information has been gathered regarding the control of in-pipe robots for performing inspection and cleaning tasks.

In this paper, various in-pipe cleaning and inspection techniques have been studied. Necessary information provided regarding different types of in-pipe robots like PIG, wall-pressed, walking, wheel and inchworm. This investigation provides a through literature on various types of sensors like ultrasonic, magnetic, touch, light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, X-ray, etc., that have been used for inspection and detection of flaws in the pipe.