👷🏽 Last week, partners ROBOPLANET and the CNRS went back to the Cristal Union site in Bazancourt, France, to conduct new tests in real conditions.

👨🏻‍💻 The CNRS team successfully tested a system relying on only ultra-wide band beacons and an IMU for localising the magnetic crawler on a mesh created from scanning the external surface of a large storage tank.  The team tested the quality of the localisation system by  tracking the ground truth position with a Leica total station.

🛠️ Further, the team  successfully performed an autonomous navigation task over large areas by performing a series of vertical and horizontal transect commands relying on the correctness of the localisation system and stopping when an obstacle was detected with a mounted 3D laser.

💻 The team also worked to acquire a datasets of signals to characterise how ultrasonic waves propagate inside the structure of the storage tank, and interact with the various structural features. Next steps will focus on building appropriate models, as well as using adapted electronics for enabling simultaneous localisation and mapping based on ultrasonic echoes, which has the potential to provide centimer accuracy.

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