Automated Planning for Inspection and Maintenance operations using Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Offshore oil and gas industry has a strong incentive to improve its traditional operations and move towards more remote controlled and automated installations. This allows for improved efficiency, reduced cost and improved quality, and safety by removing personnel out of harm's way. The use of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) in these upcoming platforms, is relevant for Inspection and Maintenance (I&M) operations. Traditionally, UGVs are used only for predefined tasks and have no capabilities for replanning, if a new task is required or any unexpected event occurs. This paper presents a novel concept for I&M operations using automated planning for UGVs. The automated planner is based on a temporal planning algorithm, and considers actions related to, for example, visiting a specific waypoint, inspect a sensor or manipulate an actuator. Also, the proposed system allows to perform replanning in case of any specific location needs to be revisited or a path is blocked. In addition, we couple the mission planner with a UGV guidance, navigation and control system, which has path planning, path following and control capabilities. To assess the performance of the proposed system, an use case for I&M operations on board of an oil and gas platform was simulated and promising results were obtained. Copyright (c) 2023 The Authors.