CTI Project: Highly Compact Robots for Power Plants Inspections

Project motivations

• Power plant safety: prevention of failures, inspections are requested by law
• Innovation and technology: offering new inspection services with high accuracy and reliability. Carrying NDT (Non Destructive Testing) sensors into unreachable places ("unreachable" by existing sensors/tools or humans due to size, temperature, immersion in liquid, etc)
• Reduction of losses: fast and efficient inspections and interventions
  

Project goals

• Develop highly compact robots for power plants inspections (gas turbines, steam turbines, generators and boilers)

Project partners

Workpackages - Milestones

- Kick off meeting: January 8th 2007
- WP1 - Specification and preliminary concept evaluation: Decision meeting September 11th 2007
- WP2 - Concept development and evaluation: current research
- WP3 - Design and evaluation of prototypes: planned for January 2010

Projects

• Air gap crawler
• Generator stator inspection
  
• Tube mover
  
• Inspection with flying systems
• Enabling technology: wireless communication
• Navigation concept for the Magnebike robot (compact magnetic wheeled inspection robot for steam chest inspection)

People

PhD students

Wolfgang Fischer (ASL-ETHZ)
Fabien Tâche (ASL-ETHZ)
Christoph Hürzeler (ASL-ETHZ)
Frédéric Rochat (Mobots-EPFL)
Patrick Schoeneich (Mobots-EPFL)

Project leaders

Dr. Gilles Caprari (ASL-ETHZ)
Dr. Luca Bongulielmi (ASL-ETHZ)

Steering commitee

Dr. Roland Moser, R&D manager (Alstom)
Dr. Francesco Mondada, Mobots director (Mobots-EPFL)
Prof. Roland Siegwart, ASL director (ASL-ETHZ)