MagneBike: toward multi climbing robots for power plant inspection

An ever-growing infrastructure, including existing and newly built power plants, as well as a rising environmental awareness in society call for inspection and maintenance systems of high efficiency. A solution can be found in the development of mobile agents to provide assistive inspection tools with improved autonomy. In collaboration with industry the MagneBike robot for power plant inspection has been developed. The robot has been tested in a specific real field environment showing critical issues but inspiring future guidelines. This paper proposes to turn the semi-autonomous MagneBike robot into a multi-agent inspection system with clear benefits in speed, robustness and flexibility of task execution. The inspection task is approached by a hybrid coverage method that combines the concepts of blanket and sweep coverage. Three algorithms implementing hybrid coverage are presented and evaluated in simulations.