AutoInspect: Toward Long-Term Autonomous Inspection and Monitoring

This article presents a technical overview of AutoInspect, a software system for robust and extensible mission-level autonomy implemented using the robot operating system (ROS). Over the past three years, we have deployed AutoInspect on multiple platforms in a variety of environments, from forests to fusion reactors, for durations ranging from hours to weeks. The AutoInspect system combines robust mapping and localization with graph-based autonomous navigation, mission execution, and scheduling, into a complete autonomous inspection and monitoring system. Code for the graph-based autonomy component will be made available at ori.ox.ac.uk/projects/autoinspect. In this article, we describe in detail our most commonly used configuration of AutoInspect: a Boston Dynamics Spot fit with a custom compute and sensing payload, called Frontier. To highlight the flexibility of the AutoInspect system, we also describe its deployment with different hardware and software configurations. We evaluate AutoInspect’s performance in two long-term deployments on Spot at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, U.K. The first deployment took place at a robotics test facility, spanning 49 days, including 14 uninterrupted days of autonomous operation. The second deployment covered 35 days in the torus hall of the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor, and achieved 15 days of uninterrupted operation. This was the first ever deployment of a fully autonomous mobile robot in a fusion facility.