answers to the questions: where am I? Where should I go? What is the best route? How should I compensate if, for example, my wheels slip? Our existing robotics platform for localisation and navigation has been configured for this type of crawler". "Accerion's smart positioning sensors were added and we linked the whole thing to our ‘global path planning’ and dashboard" says Patrick de Boevere of Serenity. "This allowed Emma, as the robot was called, to do her job via an optimal route”. Various simulations were carried out with Emma and in 2019 she crawled up against a tank wall at Dow on her own. Hans Borgt: "In addition to locating and navigating, Emma can also register and report whether there are any anomalies. For example, a little less water pressure, or a bump. When something like this happens, the exact location of the incident in the tank is recorded, and she can return to carry out an extra cleaning there". IS IT CLEAN? A discussion that sometimes runs high in a household also applies to a tank in industry: When is it really clean? Where the eyes of the cleaning employee used to be able to see whether the contamination was gone, it now had to be done by the robot. That is VTEC's specialisation. They replace the human eyes with sensors, which detect contamination by measuring surface roughness. This can also be done with black light, as organic pollution gives a certain type of reflection. There are other techniques that teach the robot whether a surface is dirty or not . AI has also recently entered the cleaning sector. EMMA & PARTNER The combination of cleaning and inspection in one robot turned out not to be possible. The vibrations and humidity caused by high-pressure cleaning resulted in deviations on VTEC sensors for the 'cleanliness measurements'. The students of Avans University of Applied Sciences in Breda developed a separate inspection robot with all the special sensors, which can ‘drive’ behind Emma. At the end of the project, it turned out that this robot was easy to control and that integration of the inspection results in the Serenity software, i.e. Emma's 'brain', was possible. This means that Emma can return to 'dirty' places. Cleaning robot Emma is still 'one of a kind'. She is a working prototype that cleans well via a planned route and reports deviations with location. Before Emma can become a commercial product, she needs to be made even more robust and ATEX certified. There is proof of concept with regard to the associated inspection robot. So it has been demonstrated that it works, but EMMA and its inspection partner could no longer be tested in practice together within the project - partly due to the Corona crisis. Hans Borgt is happy with the results. "We will certainly continue. And the techniques that were developed during the creation of Emma can probably also be used for other types of mechanical inspections". 29
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