ANYmal in the Field : Solving Industrial Inspection of an Offshore HVDC Platform with a Quadrupedal Robot

Abstract

Offshore HVDC converter stations for transportation of offshore wind energy to the coast need regular human inspection. Automated surveillance of such a platform by a mobile robot has high potential of improving the speed and quality of decision-making while reducing operating expenses and risk of unmanned operation of the platforms. However, the challenging environment of such platforms has prevented operators from making use of mobile robots to this date. Recent progress in legged robotics resulted in systems that are becoming feasible for such tasks nowadays. For this reason, the quadrupedal robot ANYmal was tested on a platform in the North Sea for automated inspection. This paper presents the results of the field tests and discusses the challenges of industrial inspection of offshore sites.