# AutoInspect: Towards Long-Term Autonomous Industrial Inspection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12785 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12785/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [LT-Exosense: A Vision-centric Multi-session Mapping System for Lifelong Safe Navigation of Exoskeletons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22164/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We give an overview of AutoInspect, a ROS-based software system for robust and extensible mission-level autonomy. Over the past three years AutoInspect has been deployed in a variety of environments, including at a mine, a chemical plant, a mock oil rig, decommissioned nuclear power plants, and a fusion reactor for durations ranging from hours to weeks. The system combines robust mapping and localisation with graph-based autonomous navigation, mission execution, and scheduling to achieve a complete autonomous inspection system. The time from arrival at a new site to autonomous mission execution can be under an hour. It is deployed on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot using a custom sensing and compute payload called Frontier. In this work we go into detail of the system's performance in two long-term deployments of 49 days at a robotics test facility, and 35 days at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor in Oxfordshire, UK.