51 Development of the RB-WATCHER began in 2018, as a specialised derivative of a predecessor platform, the RB-SUMMIT, which was created (and is still sold by Robotnik) as a multipurpose UGV just over 15 years ago. “We were searching for new, more imperative use-cases and we found a particularly strong market demand [from people] in the electrical energy sector here in Spain, who saw a valuable niche for autonomous robots in regular inspections,” says Marta Millet PascualLeone, robotics business development manager at Robotnik. “We held a period of consultation with them for a long time, trialling different robot configurations, and using different sensors and subsystems – including different Lidars, cameras, GNSS technologies and algorithms for autonomous navigation. “That enabled us to profile the needs of the ideal robotic platform for not just that use-case, but general inspection use-cases.” That profiling included key lessons on engineering the robot for electrostatic safety in electrical environments, and also for minimal vibrations and maximum environmental ruggedness against the variables specific to both the indoor and outdoor sections of the customer’s facilities. For those subsystems that needed to be placed outside of the IP54-rated shell of the UGV’s body, sourcing appropriately weatherproofed components (that would not break the bank) would prove a particular challenge for Robotnik’s engineers. While one might assume that optimising indoor navigation was the only significant challenge facing Robotnik’s software developers, the outdoor navigation also presented numerous hurdles to success due to issues such as the changing nature of outdoor conditions presenting unpredictable sources of interference, and the clustering of concrete and metal structures hindering GNSS and other sensors. The result of tackling all of these obstacles was a prototype of what is now the RB-WATCHER, which was deployed and trialled by the customer. Thanks to the developers engineering it to successfully navigate and endure consistently in both harsh indoor and outdoor industrial environments, the customer renewed the contract and added 10 more units. “With that, we had the data and confidence to profile the UGV in such a way that we could then extrapolate any necessary design tweaks to slightly modify this system for other, similar use-cases and industries, such as inspections in other types of energy companies, airports and other industrial places,” Millet adds. Robotnik RB-WATCHER | Digest Uncrewed Systems Technology | February/March 2025 Creating the RB-WATCHER took significant re-engineering of the RB-SUMMIT, including upgrading to a 48 V powertrain and finding ideal camera systems The RB-WATCHER comes from Robotnik in Spain and was originally designed for autonomous inspection in Spain’s electrical energy sector (All images courtesy of Robotnik)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI2Mzk4