Proximity Estimation with Position Adjustment for Autonomous Industrial Inspection

Due to the similarity in appearance and dense deployment of devices in industrial environments, relying solely on machine vision makes it challenging for inspection robots to accurately identify similar devices. Although wireless signals from industrial internet of things (IoT) can serve as identification features, signal fluctuations impact the accuracy and efficiency of recognition. To address this issue, this paper proposes a proximity estimation algorithm with position adjustment for autonomous industrial inspection. The algorithm considers the spatial relationships between nodes and the topological relationship between the signal strength and variations among the nodes. By analyzing the topological relationship between the signal strength and variations among the nodes, the robot autonomously adjusts its position and selects the proximal node based on the spatial topology relationship between them. We have built an inspection platform using quadruped robots to evaluate the effectiveness of the experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm further improves the efficiency of identifying proximal devices while ensuring the estimation accuracy of the algorithm.