Industrial Robotic Surgery: “Portable factories” for repair and maintenance of high-value assets

It is not an easy task to navigate in cramped/hazardous environments and then manipulate end-effectors to enable invasive operations. Surgeons have done so by hand for decades. But, can we do the same within industrial workspaces?

Despite of its strategic importance, the area of robotics for in-situ repair of large/intricate/complex geometry industrial equipment has been, somehow, not obtained full attention from researchers. However, due to the special operating and workspace conditions, off-the-shelf robots miss the dexterity and/or the necessary flexibility to perform such in-situ maintenance and repair tasks.

This presentation details on the exciting journey in developing of two (complementary) classes of specialist robots for in-situ interventions on high-value industrial assets: walking machine tools and ultra-slender snake-like manipulators.

Firstly, walking hexapod machine tools that could work both independently or coupled with other robotic systems to perform complex tasks in-situ industrial environments where human access and/or conventional robots cannot reach easily will be presented. Our robotised machine tool systems are capable to walk within hazardous and perform processing tasks (e.g. machining, inspection). Examples of the demonstrations of our robotic system will be presented in relation to targeted industrial applications related to high-value industrial (e.g. aerospace, nuclear) systems.

Secondly, the exciting journey on the development of ultra-slender snake-like robots will be summarised. Due to their high level of engineering maturity, they have been first demonstrated for aeroengine in-situ repair, then picked-up by other industrial operators (e.g. nuclear, telecom, oil & gas) to find additional applications into the initially unexpected field of medical surgery. This culminates with an example of an ultra-slender snake robot (5m length, 9mm diameter) that - operated either locally or remotely using a joystick - can perform both industrial and medical surgery without significant alteration to the system. Similar to medical surgery, the industrial engineers have used our snake robots to perform in-situ interventions of high-value assets (e.g., NDT, grinding/laser machining, coating repair), in other words ‘industrial surgery’.

As such, these approaches contribute to the foundation of the concept of “portable factories” that can be deployed to/into industrial installations and perform maintenance and repair tasks that otherwise would be difficult and/or hazardous to be performed.