The Robot Scada project.

<What have you done in the last 25 years? - series.>

What:

KIC|MPI (a Dutch knowledge center for petrochemical maintenance) assigned my company to explore the supervisory aspects of semi-autonomous industrial robots.

Result:

This study gives a practical but not so easy solution to a traditional industry, industrial cleaning and inspection, that is confronted with an ageing workforce and an upcoming gaming-generation that does not want to make their hands dirty or take large risks.

The study/prototype shows that many options are possible to achieve multiple benefits:

- pre-planning of the operation long before a shut-down.

- good insight to the operator when the robot does not act as planned.

- harvesting data for building knowledge and improvements based on data-analysis.

- auto-reporting and generating cleanness KPI’s.

How:

My company observed a lack of next-generation software tools for maintenance and inspection robots to be used in the petro-chemical industry.

What this industry needs is a Scada-like approach towards autonomous robotics: planned operation and assisted automatic operation with options of reporting. logging events and evaluating the operation.

The current robots now have remote controls based on human feedback by camera’s or direct observations by the operator. In my opinion this is just a temporary solution.

During developments, the focus was on designing and programming a supervisory tool for the operator to control the robot without visual contact with the robot and even let it control when no camera’s (blind) were available or with a significant time-delay.

Three operator dashboard modes, one for just data-capturing, one for a single on-site operator and one full-fledged version for operation in a command-post.

Second deliverable was an interactive editor where the robotic way-points and actions can be predefined. Using this tool the definition of the job that has to be done is fully covered.

The third part of the project, the data-analyzer, was planned but not implemented (yet).

Due to the restrictions in the COVID-era the communication between the supervisory dashboard software and a high pressure cleaning robot was only simulated. So never live tested with an actual cleaner robot. Most people are only convinced when they see it with their own eyes in action.

Now:

After the end of this research program my company was not granted funding to further develop the system. In-house, the developments continue, however on a slower pace.

Conclusion:

Sometimes projects can be too ambitious on the desired outcome given the limited amount of hours/funding planned for these developments. The technological gap between the status quo (the current tools) and the new solution also proved to be too large for companies involved.

It takes baby-steps but not everybody has the same long breath to wait until the minds are finally ready and the time is right.

Call for action:

Companies interested (read funding) in the continuation of the journey into this future are invited to contact me.