Heterogeneous robots coordination for industrial plant inspection and evaluation at World Robot Summit 2020

This paper describes a plant inspection robot team consisting of three types of robots that won the World Robot Summit 2020 plant disaster prevention challenge. There is a social demand to use robots for industrial plant inspection tasks to decrease the workload and risks of human operators. In this study, the authors developed a plant inspection system using a tracked vehicle, a mecanum-wheeled vehicle, and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The roles between work-related tasks and visual inspection tasks are divided by two operators, resulting in efficient operation. Experimental results show that the tracked vehicle can conduct challenging tasks such as climbing up the stairs and large-valve operations. The results also showed that the visual inspection task was performed 58% faster by the mecanum vehicle in a narrow passage and 48% faster by the UAV on the stairs, as compared with the tracked vehicle in the same situations. The analysis of the competition results showed that we obtained points in 57% (160/280) of the work-related tasks and 85% (170/200) of the visual inspection tasks as well as 92% (110/120) of the emergency response tasks in the final round.