Comment by hic

All the best! Very clear framing and definitely needed service. I remember in 2011 not too far from Fukushima after the problems with nuclear reactors. The company here faced very difficult inspection problems, including through rubbles. There were robots able to deal with some problems, but not in Japan, and anyway they had to act fast and so sent people. It apparently was safe enough, but able robots would have been so much safer.

A technical question: To scan a surface precisely, I'd rather put switches on the end effector aside the sensor, such that the arm places itself roughly above the surface to scan, pushes until the switches trigger, and scan keeping the switches on. A simple touch sense, basically. All trad robotics that smoothly follows many flat and curved surfaces. Not at all against AI here, it seems the whole thread is a constructive approach mixing the best tools to concrete targets. Not viable approach in your scenarios?

Thoughts on your concluding questions:

> where the abstraction boundary in robotics should sit. What should come from the robot manufacturer, what belongs in an application layer, and what will inevitably remain specific to the facility?

I really like when there is a "double SDK", with a low level one to target actuators and sensors individually (motor 2 of leg 4), and a higher level one with pre-defined scenarios (move forward, whatever the bot is a bipede, a quadcopter or a slug). These two API types often allow for easier work at the application layer. The SDK is also the main specific software that remains with the maker (facility?)

> industries where you've seen physical inspection tasks that look trivial to a person but are surprisingly difficult to automate

Too often a problem I have seen is... elevators. More generally unstructured environment, and environments explicitly tailored for humans. Proposals range from wireless interfaces (and so HW infrastructure dependent and hard to scale), to adding a manipulator to, say, push buttons on an elevator (and this means extra software to manipulate, recognise buttons, etc).