The round that actually happens

Every maintenance plan sets intervals. In practice those intervals compete with faults, shutdowns and holidays — and lose. A round scheduled weekly then happens monthly, and what occurred between two inspections is anyone’s guess.

On top of that comes the shortage of skilled staff. In the energy sector the worldwide shortfall of qualified personnel is estimated at several tens of thousands of positions. Anyone who has such people is reluctant to spend them on a check that ends without a finding 99 per cent of the time — rather than on the repair that follows from it.

And finally there are areas nobody likes to enter: narrow ducts, hot plant sections, areas with a gas hazard, night rounds across a large site. Every one of those inspections is a risk assessment in its own right.

1. Teach the route. The platform is driven manually to every relevant measuring point once. Position, viewing direction and sensors are defined for each point.
2. Run it autonomously. From then on it drives the route by itself at the interval you set — at night, at weekends, as often as you like.
3. Hand over the data. Readings and images go to the control room encrypted. What gets reported is deviation from the reference, not the uneventful normal case.
4. Recharge unaided. After the round the platform returns to the docking station and is ready for the next one.

The decisive point is reproducibility: because every measuring point is captured from the same position, two recordings weeks apart are directly comparable. That is precisely what a round on foot never quite achieves.

We have already worked on the task underlying this page under competition conditions. At the Robotics Challenge staged by the International Atomic Energy Agency together with CSIRO Data61 in Australia, the task for unmanned ground vehicles was: navigate a storage area autonomously, identify and count the containers held there, read their markings, measure radiation, and enter position and reading into a database. The course was a test setup with mock containers — not a real storage facility.

This is plant inspection under sharpened conditions. Every measuring point has to be assigned to an object beyond doubt, every result documented traceably — in an environment where nobody stays longer than necessary. That chain of approach, recognise, measure, assign, document is exactly what an inspection round in an industrial plant consists of. The difference lies in the reading, not in the procedure.

• Substations and grid infrastructure — thermography on switchgear bays, visual checks, monitoring of unstaffed sites
• Power stations and generation — rounds in turbine halls, at ancillary plant and across the outdoor site
• Water and wastewater — pumping stations, treatment works, sewers and structures with a gas hazard
• Industrial and chemical parks — extensive sites, tank farms, pipe racks, loading areas
• Steel, paper, cement — hot and dusty areas with heavy wear on rotating parts
• Landfills, biogas and logistics centres — large areas with few people on them