C L E A N I N G R O B O T AUTONOMOUS CLEANING VESSEL WALLS Barrels, towers and silos must be cleaned in a timely fashion in order to enable high-quality inspection and thus ensure the integrity of installations. Cleaning has traditionally been carried out by people, using high-pressure cleaners. This is often no longer permitted by the processing industry. Within a few years, people are no longer allowed to enter enclosed spaces. That is why the Smart Tooling project looked for an autonomously operating cleaning robot. SMART TOOLING Manual Industrial Cleaning is subject to strict legal requirements and safety risks. In addition cleaning must be perfect to prevent contamination and enable optimum inspection. A self-contained cleaning robot must, just like a human being, use many senses O B J E C T I V E CLEANING ROBOT: AUTONOMOUS FUNCTIONAL PROTOTYPE PRECISE POSITIONING REPEATABLE ACTIONS INSPECTION ROBOT: PROOF OF CONCEPT OBSERVES IMPURITIES LINKS DATA BACK TO CLEANER and take the right decisions to achieve the desired level of 'clean'. Within the Smart Tooling project, a large team has been working on this. NON-MAN ENTRY Industrial cleaning must therefore be done properly, efficiently and safely. Manual work gave a good result but was often not safe for the employee. That is why major asset owners such as Dow and BASF decided more than ten years ago not to allow this to happen again. And now it goes even further: 'Man-entry' in confined spaces will no longer be allowed in a number of years. Still, the cleaning has to be done, and so there is a great deal of work to be done 27
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