Virtual planning for autonomous inspection of electromechanical products

High quality electromechanical products require sophisticated and costly diagnostic tools to ensure the absence of defects in the final artefacts. The main requirements for reliability tests are flexibility, sensor sharing and early defect detection. The aim is the substitution of the current practice based on manual checking of few samples with standardized and repeatable quality control carried out by autonomous mobile platforms. Virtual planning of the inspection tasks, the simulation of the navigation in a poorly structured environment as well as the interaction with the product, are crucial aspects which have been faced through a dedicated system framework. The paper proposes a solution composed of a software for the virtual planning and simulation of inspection tasks, hardware setup composed of an autonomous platform with sensors and actuators, and a service oriented software infrastructure for navigation and perception. Consistent paths to be followed by the robot are elaborated in a graphical environment on the basis of inspected product locations and measuring tasks. The system has been implemented for household appliance inspection in reliability laboratories where life tests are carried out under real operation conditions. The results in terms of inspection mission planning capabilities and localization performances are presented.