MARWIN: a mobile autonomous robot for maintenance and inspection in a 4d environment

Dehne, Andre; Möller, Nantwin; Hermes, Thorsten

doi:10.1109/rem.2017.8075228

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Facility inspection and maintenance are important routines in the operations of complex industrial facilities such as particle accelerators (Dehne et al, 2017) and nuclear power plants (Sarmita et al, 2022). In such cases, VR visualization systems are crucial in enabling users to perceive and interact with remote environments that are often inaccessible to onsite human visits due to safety hazards and regulations (di Castro et al, 2018).…”

Section: Immersive Visualization For Virtual Facility Inspectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The possibility for users to spatially interact with industrial designs and thoroughly inspect these facilities in a telepresence environment can significantly improve productivity, task engagement, and workflows (Büttner et al, 2017). Moreover, at critical infrastructures such as particle accelerators and nuclear power plants, where human onsite visits to the facilities are limited due to safety hazards and operation constraints (di Castro et al, 2018;Dehne et al, 2017), VR visualization systems that accurately represent the complex facility conditions and fully immersive users in the inaccessible remote environments is crucial for online facility inspection and maintenance planning. However, existing industrial VR systems typically visualize the virtual facilities using a polygonal representation of their computer-aided design (CAD) models (Raposo et al, 2006) or meshes reconstructed from photogrammetry (Schönberger and Frahm, 2016), RGBD cameras (Zollhöfer et al, 2018), or Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) measurements Gong et al (2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Magic NeRF lens: interactive fusion of neural radiance fields for virtual facility inspection

Li,

Schmidt,

Rolff

et al. 2024

Front. Virtual Real.

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Virtual reality (VR) has become an important interactive visualization tool for various industrial processes including facility inspection and maintenance. The capability of a VR application to present users with realistic simulations of complex systems and immerse them in, for example, inaccessible remote environments is often essential for using VR in real-world industrial domains. While many VR solutions have already been developed to support virtual facility inspection, previous systems provide immersive visualizations only with limited realism, because the real-world conditions of facilities are often difficult to reconstruct with accurate meshes and point clouds or typically too time-consuming to be consistently updated in computer-aided design (CAD) software toolkits. In this work, we present Magic NeRF Lens, a VR framework that supports immersive photorealistic visualizations of complex industrial facilities leveraging the recent advancement of neural radiance fields (NeRF). We introduce a data fusion technique to merge a NeRF model with the polygonal representation of it’s corresponding CAD model, which optimizes VR NeRF rendering through magic-lens-style interactions while introducing a novel industrial visualization design that can support practical tasks such as facility maintenance planning and redesign. We systematically benchmarked the performance of our framework, investigated users’ perceptions of the magic-lens-style visualization design through a visual search experiment to derive design insights, and performed an empirical evaluation of our system through expert reviews. To support further research and development of customized VR NeRF applications, the source code of the toolkit was made openly available.

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Section: Immersive Visualization For Virtual Facility Inspectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Magic NeRF lens: interactive fusion of neural radiance fields for virtual facility inspection

Li,

Schmidt,

Rolff

et al. 2024

Front. Virtual Real.

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“…Figure 13a shows 4 DoF manipulators attached to a 2-wheel drive robot base. Instead of teleoperation, many researchers took a dual approach to design the control system, considering both autonomous and remote-controlled modes [93][94][95]. A semi-autonomous system, CERNbot [94], was designed with few predefined standard operating procedures, as shown in Figure 13b.…”

Section: Maintenance In Nuclear Power Plants and Hazardous Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Review on the Prospects of Mobile Manipulators for Smart Maintenance of Railway Track

et al. 2023

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Inspection and repair interventions play vital roles in the asset management of railways. Autonomous mobile manipulators possess considerable potential to replace humans in many hazardous railway track maintenance tasks with high efficiency. This paper investigates the prospects of the use of mobile manipulators in track maintenance tasks. The current state of railway track inspection and repair technologies is initially reviewed, revealing that very few mobile manipulators are in the railways. Of note, the technologies are analytically scrutinized to ascertain advantages, unique capabilities, and potential use in the deployment of mobile manipulators for inspection and repair tasks across various industries. Most mobile manipulators in maintenance use ground robots, while other applications use aerial, underwater, or space robots. Power transmission lines, the nuclear industry, and space are the most extensive application areas. Clearly, the railways infrastructure managers can benefit from the adaptation of best practices from these diversified designs and their broad deployment, leading to enhanced human safety and optimized asset digitalization. A case study is presented to show the potential use of mobile manipulators in railway track maintenance tasks. Moreover, the benefits of the mobile manipulator are discussed based on previous research. Finally, challenges and requirements are reviewed to provide insights into future research.

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“…The accelerator of the research facility European XFEL is world wide the only one generating 27000 X-ray flashes a second 1 . Compared to other research facilities the XFEL is generating 225 times more X-Ray flashes per second.…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper is an extension of work originally presented in International Conference on Research and Education in Mechatronics (REM) 2017 [1]. Within the research co-operation of the "hochschule 21" and the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) of the Helmholtz Association a "mobile and autonomous robot for maintenance and inspection" (MARWIN) was developed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

MARWIN: Localization of an Inspection Robot in a Radiation exposed Environment

Dehne¹,

Möller²,

Hermes³

2018

Adv. sci. technol. eng. syst. j.

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MARWIN is a mobile autonomous robot platform designed to carry out maintenance and inspection tasks in the European XFEL. The XFEL is an accelerator plant which is operated in Hamburg, Germany. The robot system consists of an four-wheel drive chassis and a scissor lift for easy inspection and maintenance tasks. Through this manipulator and the chassis, the robot system acquires three degrees of freedom. MARWIN is intended for autonomous radiation measurements along the XFEL research facility and thus needs accurate localization. The facility describes a straight tunnel and consists partly of irregular structures and also of sections with almost no obstacles. In the 1000 meter long sections in which MARWIN operates, the robot must approach the facilities to a few centimeters, but must not touch them. For this purpose, different localization methods were tested and checked for accuracy. Furthermore, the influence of radiation on the localization is investigated.

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MARWIN: a mobile autonomous robot for maintenance and inspection in a 4d environment

Cited by 5 publications

References 1 publication

Magic NeRF lens: interactive fusion of neural radiance fields for virtual facility inspection

Magic NeRF lens: interactive fusion of neural radiance fields for virtual facility inspection

A Review on the Prospects of Mobile Manipulators for Smart Maintenance of Railway Track

MARWIN: Localization of an Inspection Robot in a Radiation exposed Environment

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