ANYmal

A crucial task for energy providers is the reliable and safe operation of their plants, especially when producing energy offshore. Autonomous mobile robots are able to offer comprehensive support through regular and automated inspection of machinery and infrastructure. In a world’s first pilot installation, transmission system operator TenneT tested the autonomous legged robot ANYmal on one of the world’s largest offshore converter platforms in the North Sea.

In September 2018, the ANYbotics field team boarded a helicopter to fly out to one of the world’s largest offshore converter platforms in the North Sea. Equipped with a customized sensorhead, our four-legged robotic platform ANYmal autonomously performed various inspection tasks of the platform in a one-week pilot installation, making it the world’s first autonomous offshore robot.

Offshore Wind Farms
Offshore energy production is a key component of global energy supply. Apart from oil and natural gas extraction, wind energy is increasingly being produced offshore. One of the key innovators in this field is the Dutch-German transmission system operator TenneT, which connects large-scale offshore wind farms to the onshore grid over a high voltage DC connection. Set out to provide reliable and low-cost energy transmission and distribution, the company adopts most recent technologies.

Robotic Inspection with ANYmal
ANYbotics is partnering with TenneT to evaluate robotic inspection and maintenance on their offshore converter platforms. In periods of unmanned platform operation, a mobile robot helps to reduce the risk of disruptions and ensures the security of the electricity supply. Based on its autonomous navigation capabilities, ANYmal performs routine inspection tasks to monitor machine operations, read out sensory equipment and detect thermal hotspots and oil or water leakages. Whenever required, ANYmal can be remotely operated from an onshore control center in order for TenneT to receive real-time information through the robot’s onboard visual and thermal cameras, microphones and gas detection sensors.

Successful Pilot Installation
Before being deployed on the offshore mission, the ANYbotics field team underwent a rigorous safety training including helicopter escape and survival on sea scenarios. After being taken on a guided tour of the platform to 3D-map the environment and learn the position and characteristics of all inspection points, ANYmal autonomously navigated the platform and processed inspection protocols. The video documents a fully autonomous mission, covering a total of 16 inspection points such as gauges, levers, oil- and water levels and various other visual and thermal measurements.

This handy video-tutorial course gives an introduction to the Robot Operating System (ROS), including many of the available tools that are commonly used in robotics. With the help of different examples, the tutorials offer a great starting point to learn programming robots. You will learn how to create software including simulation, to interface sensors and actuators, and to integrate control algorithms.

The course consists of a guided tutorial and exercises with increasing level of difficulty working with an autonomous robot. We provide recordings of the lectures and give an introduction to the exercises. From the course website, you can download all the material including exercise sheets and templates, and use the provided Virtual Machine (VM) image to start programming right away.

Objectives:

• ROS architecture: Master nodes, topics, messages, services, parameters and actions
• Console commands: Navigating and analyzing the ROS system and the catkin workspace
• Creating ROS packages: Structure, launch-files, and best practices
• ROS C++ client library (roscpp): Creating your own ROS C++ programs
• Simulating with ROS: Gazebo simulator, robot models (URDF) and simulation environments (SDF)
• Working with visualizations (RViz) and user interface tools (rqt)
• Inside ROS: TF transformation system, time, bags

Course 1:

Course 2:

Course 3:

Course 4:

Download the full presentation here.

P. Fankhauser, D. Jud, M. Wermelinger, M. Hutter, “Programming for Robotics – Introduction to ROS”, ETH Zurich, 2017. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.14140.44161

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This video shows how a robot team can work together to map and navigate toward a goal in an unknown terrain that may change over time. Using an onboard monocular camera, a flying robot first scouts the area, creating both a map of visual features for simultaneous localization and a dense elevation map of the environment. A legged ground robot then localizes itself against the global map, and uses the elevation map to plan a traversable path to a goal.

While following the planned path, the absolute pose corrections are fused with the legged robot’s state estimation and the elevation map is continuously updated with distance measurements from an onboard laser range sensor. This allows the legged robot to safely navigate towards its goal while taking into account any changes in the environment.

More info: http://leggedrobotics.ethz.ch

This work was published as:
P. Fankhauser, M. Bloesch, P. Krüsi, R. Diethelm, M. Wermelinger, T. Schneider, M. Dymczyk, M. Hutter, and R. Siegwart, “Collaborative Navigation for Flying and Walking Robots,” in IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2016.