Robotics Applicability for Routine Operator Tasks in Power Plant Facilities

There has been a growing interest in adopting autonomous robots to perform routine tasks in facilities management. The goal of facility management is to ensure that the facility performs to design standards. Currently, the cost of maintenance and operations of a facility over its life cycle is oftentimes more than the initial cost of construction. One of the reasons for these phenomena is the cost of repetitive but necessary tasks. Particularly for power plants, such repetitive tasks like routine operator rounds to check for leakages, dripping, gauge readings and turning of valves require a significant number of personnel who are exposed to a certain amount of health risk due to the nature of the facility aside incurring basic costs for remuneration and health benefits. These tasks can be automated and carried out by autonomous robots in collaboration with humans to drive down the risk and incurred costs significantly. Our study proposes a solution to routine operator task of checking gauges of machines within a power plant to monitor performance using an autonomous robot-based system that can autonomously navigate to spaces by estimating the reading from gauges to monitor performance and give reports to basic operator round tasks using the Building Information Model (BIM), Robot Operating System (ROS), Computer vision algorithms, a mobile robot and our designed algorithm. Our proposed solution in this study can act as a blueprint for further research to provide more efficient solutions in the maintenance and management of a power related facilities.