To reduce Operation and Maintenance (O&M) expenditure on offshore wind farms, wherein 80% of the cost relates to deploying personnel, the offshore wind sector looks to advances in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI) for solutions. Barriers to residential Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) autonomy as a service, include operational challenges in run-time safety compliance, reliability and resilience, due to the complexities of dealing with known and unknown risk in dynamic environments. In this paper we incorporate a Symbiotic System Of Systems Approach (SSOSA) that uses a Symbiotic Digital Architecture (SDA) to provide a cyber physical orchestration of enabling technologies. Implementing a SSOSA enables Cooperation, Collaboration and Corroboration (C ³ ), as to address run-time verification of safety, reliability and resilience during autonomous missions. Our SDA provides a means to synchronize distributed digital models of the robot, environment and infrastructure. Through the coordinated bidirectional communication network of the SDA, the remote human operator has improved visibility and understanding of the mission profile. We evaluate our SSOSA in an asset inspection mission within a confined operating environment. Demonstrating the ability of our SSOSA to overcome safety, reliability and resilience challenges. The SDA supports lifecycle learning and co-evolution with knowledge sharing across the interconnected systems. Our results evaluate both sudden and gradual faults, as well as unknown events, that may jeopardize an autonomous mission. Using distributed and coordinated decision making, the SSOSA enhances the analysis of the mission status, which includes diagnostics of critical sub-systems within the resident robot. This evaluation demonstrates that the SSOSA provides enhanced run-time operational resilience and safety compliance to BVLOS autonomous missions. The SSOSA has the potential to be a highly transferable methodology to other mission scenarios and technologies, providing a pathway to implementing scalable autonomy as a service.

The nuclear energy sector can benefit from mobile robots for remote inspection and handling, reducing human exposure to radiation. Advances in cyber–physical systems have improved robotic platforms in this sector through digital twin (DT) technology. DTs enhance situational awareness for robot operators, crucial for safety in the nuclear energy sector, and their value is anticipated to increase with the growing complexity of cyber–physical systems. The primary motivation of this work is to rapidly develop and evaluate a robot fleet interface that accounts for these benefits in the context of nuclear environments. Here, we introduce a multimodal immersive DT platform for cyber–physical robot fleets based on the ROS‐Unity 3D framework. The system design enables fleet monitoring and management by integrating building information models, mission parameters, robot sensor data, and multimodal user interaction through traditional and virtual reality interfaces. A modified heuristic evaluation approach, which accounts for the positive and negative aspects of the interface, was introduced to accelerate the iterative design process of our DT platform. Robot operators from leading nuclear research institutions (Sellafield Ltd. and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency) performed a simulated robot inspection mission while providing valuable insights into the design elements of the cyber–physical system. The three usability themes that emerged and inspired our design recommendations for future developers include increasing the interface's flexibility, considering each robot's individuality, and adapting the platform to expand sensor visualization capabilities.

Nuclear facilities have a regulatory requirement to measure radiation levels within Post Operational Clean Out (POCO) around nuclear facilities each year, resulting in a trend towards robotic deployments to gain an improved understanding during nuclear decommissioning phases. The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority supports the view that human‐in‐the‐loop (HITL) robotic deployments are a solution to improve procedures and reduce risks within radiation characterisation of nuclear sites. The authors present a novel implementation of a Cyber‐Physical System (CPS) deployed in an analogue nuclear environment, comprised of a multi‐robot (MR) team coordinated by a HITL operator through a digital twin interface. The development of the CPS created efficient partnerships across systems including robots, digital systems and human. This was presented as a multi‐staged mission within an inspection scenario for the heterogeneous Symbiotic Multi‐Robot Fleet (SMuRF). Symbiotic interactions were achieved across the SMuRF where robots utilised automated collaborative governance to work together, where a single robot would face challenges in full characterisation of radiation. Key contributions include the demonstration of symbiotic autonomy and query‐based learning of an autonomous mission supporting scalable autonomy and autonomy as a service. The coordination of the CPS was a success and displayed further challenges and improvements related to future MR fleets.

Since 2015, there has been an increase in articles on anomaly detection in robotic systems, reflecting its growing importance in improving the robustness and reliability of the increasingly utilized autonomous robots. This review paper investigates the literature on the detection of anomalies in Autonomous Robotic Missions (ARMs). It reveals different perspectives on anomaly and juxtaposition to fault detection. To reach a consensus, we infer a unified understanding of anomalies that encapsulate their various characteristics observed in ARMs and propose a classification of anomalies in terms of spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal elements based on their fundamental features. Further, the paper discusses the implications of the proposed unified understanding and classification in ARMs and provides future directions. We envisage a study surrounding the specific use of the term anomaly, and methods for their detection could contribute to and accelerate the research and development of a universal anomaly detection system for ARMs.