Lessons learned:Symbiotic autonomous robot ecosystem for nuclear environments

Nuclear facilities have a regulatory requirement to measure radiation levels within Post Operational Clean Out(POCO)around nuclear facilities each year,resulting in a trend towards robotic deployments to gain an improved understanding during nuclear decommissioning phases.The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority supports the view that human-in-the-loop(HITL)robotic deployments are a solution to improve procedures and reduce risks within radiation characterisation of nuclear sites.The authors present a novel implementation of a Cyber-Physical System(CPS)deployed in an analogue nuclear environment,comprised of a multi-robot(MR)team coordinated by a HITL operator through a digital twin interface.The development of the CPS created efficient partnerships across systems including robots,digital systems and human.This was presented as a multi-staged mission within an inspection scenario for the hetero-geneous Symbiotic Multi-Robot Fleet(SMuRF).Symbiotic interactions were achieved across the SMuRF where robots utilised automated collaborative governance to work together,where a single robot would face challenges in full characterisation of radiation.Key contributions include the demonstration of symbiotic autonomy and query-based learning of an autonomous mission supporting scalable autonomy and autonomy as a service.The coordination of the CPS was a success and displayed further challenges and improvements related to future MR fleets.

A review: Challenges and opportunities for artificial intelligence and robotics in the offshore wind sector

The UK has set plans to increase offshore wind capacity from 22GW to 154GW by 2030. With such tremendous growth, the sector is now looking to Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI) in order to tackle lifecycle service barriers as to support sustainable and profitable offshore wind energy production. Today, RAI applications are predominately being used to support short term objectives in operation and maintenance. However, moving forward, RAI has the potential to play a critical role throughout the full lifecycle of offshore wind infrastructure, from surveying, planning, design, logistics, operational support, training and decommissioning. This paper presents one of the first systematic reviews of RAI for the offshore renewable energy sector. The state-of-the-art in RAI is analyzed with respect to offshore energy requirements, from both industry and academia, in terms of current and future requirements. Our review also includes a detailed evaluation of investment, regulation and skills development required to support the adoption of RAI. The key trends identified through a detailed analysis of patent and academic publication databases provide insights to barriers such as certification of autonomous platforms for safety compliance and reliability, the need for digital architectures for scalability in autonomous fleets, adaptive mission planning for resilient resident operations and optimization of human machine interaction for trusted partnerships between people and autonomous assistants. Our study concludes with identification of technological priorities and outlines their integration into a new ‘symbiotic digital architecture’ to deliver the future of offshore wind farm lifecycle management.