Inspecta 1.0: Incorporating Spot Robotic Support

Sandia National Laboratories has designed and is developing Inspecta (International Nuclear Safeguards Personal Examination and Containment Tracking Assistant), an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled smart digital assistant (SDA) with robotic support. The goal is to provide inspectors an in-field digital auxiliary support capable of performing limited physical functions through an embodied intelligence on tasks identified as tedious, challenging, or prone to human error. Sandia has selected a high-impact inspection task, seal examination, in which an early Inspecta prototype residing on a smartphone could aid an inspector alongside a Boston Dynamics’ “Spot” robot. Spot, as part of the Inspecta platform and with human inspector instruction, will initially locate a seal, use optical character recognition to image the seal number and communicate the number back to Inspecta, who will track the overall seal examination task. As the project progresses, Spot will perform more complicated activities associated with seal examination. This paper describes Spot’s autonomy capabilities, progress on Spot integration with Inspecta, and how future functionality will be further developed under the Inspecta project.