Offshore platforms are massively complex and unstructured environments consisting of structures at different angles, steep inclines, and inverted surfaces. To navigate such unstructured environments efficiently and to be useful for inspection and exploration tasks of offshore platforms, a robot needs to be capable of climbing inclined surfaces and to be equipped with a sensor payload. One major problem with current climbing robots is that they are not built in a modular fashion, which makes it harder to adapt the system to new tasks, to repair the system, and to replace and reconfigure modules. In our recent publication in Soft Robotics, we present a 450 g and a 250 × 250 × 140 mm modular, untethered hybrid hard/soft robot—Limpet II. The Limpet II uses a hybrid electromagnetic module as its core module to allow adhesion and locomotion capabilities. The Limpet II also has a sensor payload with nine different sensing modalities, which can be used to inspect and monitor offshore structures and the conditions surrounding them. Since the Limpet II is designed as a modular system, the modules can be reconfigured to achieve multiple tasks, which are demonstrated in the publication. The Limpet II is being developed as part of the flagship Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets (ORCA Hub) project in the United Kingdom. The Limpet II builds up on previous robotic systems from our group: version 1 of the Limpet and the Linbot system.
You can find the original publication here: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/soro.2019.0161
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