Autonomous Robotics
Harsh operating conditions and difficult accessibility of assets have made us rethink our approach of traditional inspection methods. We took this opportunity to design and develop special in-line inspection robots. We enable them to solve tasks and act in unstructured and unknown environments or confined spaces without endangering people.
Explore our autonomous robotics research fields
While developing robots for different applications, we have taken care of controlling their ability of not only receiving information from their environment but also an understanding of themselves within it. We constantly develop models that enable robots to cooperate with its surroundings in different ways. In our area of expertise, robotic manipulation refers to the way it interacts with the objects around them: for example perform measurements on the particular test object or inspect underwater structures. Interaction requires planning and controlling of the motion of their hands and arms in an intelligent way which is why we focus on developing appropriate algorithms and systems.
Robot perception is essential for robotic navigation, as navigation is nuanced in terms of the task at hand and the often unstructured environment. It often requires customized machine learning algorithms and neural networks for localization, to address and fulfill the particular challenge. Perception, in general, calls for a variety of hardware integrations, such as cameras or various sensors, supported by the algorithms to make them function in unison.
By integrating cameras into the robots, we gain data – the basis for decision-making. For this, we need computer vision and necessarily the right techniques for capturing, processing and evaluating digital images. However, images alone are not enough. We also need to extract information from the images to identify, classify and size every detail of the inspected object. This is how we find everything our customers need.
Naturally, we are also responsible to give a robot its juice and get-up-and-go supply. The selection of its power source needs to be made in the early stages of design since it impacts the complete system and its future capabilities. Our robots consume battery power when they are deployed in harsh environments fulfilling their tasks. We provide the supply in the form of special rechargeable batteries, which we also develop and produce ourselves. The type of battery depends on the safety, life cycle and weight. We are able to always make use of the best suited energy supply for our applications.