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Mr. Daniel Mitchell received a Master’s in Electrical and Electronic Engineering with distinction from Heriot-Watt University in 2020. He is currently a PhD Student at the University of Glasgow and a Visiting Student Researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). His research focuses on symbiotic multi-robot fleets which look to address heterogeneous robotic teams connected with a human-in-the-loop operator for both offshore renewable energy and nuclear sectors. In addition to this, he develops a novel dual application sensing mechanism which uses non-destructive sensing for asset integrity inspection and foresight monitoring for robotic platforms. In 2023 he was presented with the IET Rising Star Award at the IET Excellence and Innovation Awards. Since 2019 he has worked as part of MicroSense Technologies Ltd developing novel radar sensing which has seen collaborations of work alongside the Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets (ORCA) Hub.
Humanity is currently facing challenges surrounding the operation, inspection and maintenance of current energy infrastructure systems. These challenges include confined spaces, unstructured environments and hazardous areas to human health. Net-zero energy targets have instigated an accelerated energy transition, with the adoption of offshore wind farms due to increase, resulting in more and larger turbines. Several nuclear facilities are undergoing improvements in decommissioning to harness more information, improve site knowledge and create safer procedures. Robotics and autonomous systems are increasingly being used to address several of these problems within the energy sector. Currently, individual robotic platforms are being deployed in single, short-term use cases in controlled environments with a team of engineers to evaluate the effectiveness of robotics for different use cases. This does not result in increased productivity, efficiency or value for operators of large-scale facilities. This research focusses on the requirements of creating a Cyber Physical System (CPS) via a Symbiotic Multi-Robot Fleet (SMuRF) of diverse heterogeneous robotic platforms which operate individually or as part as a team to feed information back to a human-in-the-loop. A heterogeneous robotic fleet is used to leverage the robots capability within autonomous inspection missions where robots work as part of a team to complete the objectives of the mission. Symbiotic interactions occur autonomously across robotic platforms where elements of Cooperation, Collaboration or Corroboration (C3) are required within the mission. This can be due to reliability or resilience issues which inhibit or limit the successful completion of a mission. The orchestration of the SMuRF is implemented via a Symbiotic Digital Architecture (SDA) that permits near to real-time C3 for up to 1600 distributed robots, sensors and assets. This research demonstrates that the SDA enhances mission performance and intrinsic autonomy challenges in multi-robot fleet management to improve run-time safety compliance, reliability, resilience and productivity. The research envisions that the proposed SMuRF will assist in overcoming barriers in achieving scalable autonomy and directly benefit the objective of reducing cost, risk, and enhancing functionality to autonomous IMR operations.