24 The three Ds – dull, dirty and dangerous – have for some time been applied to the kinds of jobs that industry is eager to delegate to uncrewed systems; that eagerness is now spreading from outdoor applications to indoor ones. The indoors of heavy industrial facilities such as oil rigs, factories and warehouses can be particularly dangerous places, given the risks posed by chance explosions, chemical leaks and so on. However, despite the need to replace people in such environments, uncrewed systems geared for doing so are rare, and with good reason. Heavy industrial facilities are not designed for wheeled robots to travel through them easily, owing to obstacles such as pipes, cables, doors and steps. UAVs can offer an alternative here, but they raise issues with loud rotor noise, exposed propeller blades and short mission runtimes, so they are rare as well. Legged robots offer a solution though. A UGV that can walk could navigate obstacles as we do, whether it be a pipe, a staircase or a worker-filled corridor. Hilario Tome, CTO of Keybotic, has a lot of experience with UGVs, having worked on commercial bipedal robots as well as full-on autonomy through the virtual category of DARPA’s third Grand Challenge. Its first two challenges were aimed at accelerating self-driving car technology and small teleoperated materialshandling robots. The third was the first October/November 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology
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