The VIKINGS Autonomous Inspection Robot: Competing in the ARGOS Challenge

This article presents the overall architecture of the VIKINGS robot, winner of two competitions and one of five contenders in the ARGOS Challenge. The VIKINGS robot is an autonomous, or remotely operated, robot that inspects oil and gas sites and can assess various petrochemical risks based on its embedded sensors and processing. As described in this article, our robot is able to autonomously monitor all elements of a petrochemical process on a multistory oil platform, such as reading gauges, state of the valves, and proper functioning of the pumps, even while it faces many hazards, e.g., leaks, obstacles, or holes in its path. The goal of this article is to present the major components of our robot's architecture and the algorithms we developed for certain functions (e.g., localization, gauge reading, and so on). We also present the methodology we adopted, which allowed us to succeed in this challenge.