Roboverse Reply, the Reply Group company specialised in integration scenarios around robotics and the industrial metaverse, is the winner of the AIRA Challenge (Advanced Industrial Robotic Applications), an international competition to automate inspection in chemical production facilities by leveraging on robotics technology. The challenge was held during ACHEMA 2022 in Frankfurt am Main, the world’s largest trade fair for the process industry.
The competition, launched by a consortium of five of the world’s leading chemical and pharmaceutical companies including BASF, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Merck and Wacker, promotes the development of new ideas and practical applications. Six teams with five different autonomous mobile robots competed to solve recurring tasks, such as safety tours in chemical and pharmaceutical plants.
The tasks were to navigate autonomously through a chemical facility, handle typical floor types of a chemical plant environment and overcome obstacles, find and monitor a gauge and document its reading, transport a sample while collecting data and more. The last task was to develop a concept that enables a quick and easy tool change on the robot to make it more flexible and versatile.
Roboverse Reply experts developed a solution with the agile mobile robot Spot from Boston Dynamics for these automated routine inspections, data capture tasks and convinced the jury with consistent, high performance and mastery of all the given missions.
“Autonomous mobile robots like Spot are agile and offer tremendous flexibility to automate tasks, especially in hazardous areas. In our robotics lab we are already working on the next generation of robotic solutions: the Real-World Metaverse provides a common reference for AI computer vision, allowing it to collaborate with Spatial Computing devices like AR and VR tools and robots. This will take autonomous mobile robot navigation to the next level” said Filippo Rizzante, CTO of Reply. “We are delighted to have won the prestigious AIRA competition, which affirms our leadership in implementing highly innovative robotic use cases.”
