Locomotion versatility robotics for hazardous industrial confined spaces operation

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

According to the International Labor Organization, about 2.3 million work-related deaths occur annually worldwide. Specifically, incidents taking place when working within confined spaces contribute to thousands of deaths and disabling injuries every year. For example, Alberta's oil and gas industry reports close to 3,000 people being disabled due to confined spaces work-related accidents annually. Autonomous robots have the potential to be used as effective tools for operations in complex confined hazardous environments - both structured and unstructured. Their motion capabilities to maneuver and perform dangerous work in environments such as those encountered inside collapsed buildings, pressure vessels, silos, storage tanks, underground cable galleries, aircraft wings, manholes, pump stations, among many others are tremendous. However, major challenges related to autonomy, locomotion, and adaptability remain before robots can be effectively deployed inside such spaces where safety-critical decisions must be made despite uncertainty in the estimation, execution, and the environment. This project will develop novel hybrid mobile robot configurations capable to access spaces of diverse geometrical features and hazardous levels combined with reinforcement learning tools for whole-body tractable motion-planning solutions. The results will enable to deploy hybrid reconfigurable robots under uncertainty estimation via sophisticated estimation schemes like visual-inertial odometry that depend on the distribution of the features in the environment. The work is important to reduce the number of work-related incidents when working inside industrial chaotic hazardous confined spaces. The results will make possible the operation of robots in critical applications including power plant inspection, construction, mining, and many others reducing placing humans in hazardous-work situations. Using the wealth of experience in Alberta's oil and gas industry, the project will develop effective robotic tools that can be in position and deployed when needed. The results will render work in hazardous confined spaces safer, more effective, and help reduce the high cost associated with confined space entry.