Robotic Inspection

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Overview

Robotic inspection studies how robots can gather reliable information about infrastructure, industrial equipment, and natural or hazardous environments. Systems range from aerial, underwater, and in-pipe robots to mobile manipulators, using cameras, LiDAR, thermal, tactile, and other sensors to detect defects and build 3D records. Common approaches combine sensor fusion and anomaly detection with coverage planning, next-best-view selection, route optimization, and compliant control for close or contact-based measurements. A central challenge is making inspection reliable in real settings with occlusion, uncertain geometry, changing illumination, and limited energy, while ensuring that collected evidence supports trustworthy condition assessments.

Latest papers

CardsList

50 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. AgiPIX: Bridging Simulation and Reality in Indoor Aerial Inspection

    Apr 9, 2026Sasanka Kuruppu Arachchige, Juan Jose Garcia, Changda Tian +4Aerial RoboticsRobotic Inspection

    Computing Sciences department at Tampere University, Finland · U2IS at ENSTA, Paris · Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Greece.

  2. COMB: Common Open Modular robotic platform for Bees

    Apr 4, 2026Pranav Kedia, Marie Messerich, Tim LandgrafRoboticsModular Robotics

    Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Germany · Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany · Dahlem Center for Machine Learning and Robotics, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  3. VitaTouch: Property-Aware Vision-Tactile-Language Model for Robotic Quality Inspection in Manufacturing

    Apr 2, 2026Junyi Zong, Qingxuan Jia, Meixian Shi +5Tactile-Vision-Language-Action ModelsRobotic Anomaly Detection

    School of Intelligent Engineering and Automation, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China. · Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing 100094, China. · School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China. +2

  4. Design of an In-Pipe Robot with Contact-Angle-Guided Kinematic Decoupling for Crosstalk-Suppressed Locomotion

    Mar 28, 2026Min Yang, Yang Tian, Longchuang Li +2Robot LocomotionRobotic Inspection

    Robotics and Autonomous Systems Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou 511453, China · Department of Engineering, Shinshu University, Nagano 380-8553, Japan · College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China

  5. SafeGuard ASF: SR Agentic Humanoid Robot System for Autonomous Industrial Safety

    Mar 26, 2026Thanh Nguyen Canh, Thang Tran Viet, Thanh Tuan Tran +1Robot SafetyHumanoid Robotics

    Strike Robotics

  6. Towards automatic smoke detector inspection: Recognition of the smoke detectors in industrial facilities and preparation for future drone integration

    Mar 25, 2026Lukas Kratochvila, Jakub Stefansky, Simon Bilik +6Object DetectionRobotic Inspection

    Department of Control and Instrumentation, Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic · Department of Cybernetics and Biomedical Engineering, VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic · Institute for Research and Applications of Fuzzy Modeling, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic +2

  7. PiCo: Active Manifold Canonicalization for Robust Robotic Visual Anomaly Detection

    Mar 24, 2026Teng Yan, Binkai Liu, Shuai Liu +2Robotic Anomaly DetectionRobotic Perception

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

  8. Active Robotic Perception for Disease Detection and Mapping in Apple Trees

    Mar 24, 2026Hayden Feddock, Francisco Yandun, Srđan Aćimović +1Robotic InspectionActive Perception

    H. Feddock, F. Yandun, and A. Silwal are with the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA · S. Aćimović is with the Department of Plant Pathology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA

  9. A 3D Reconstruction Benchmark for Asset Inspection

    Mar 18, 2026James L. Gray, Nikolai Goncharov, Alexandre Cardaillac +33D Reconstruction Benchmarks3D Reconstruction

    Australian Centre for Robotics, School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

  10. Scalable Inspection Planning via Flow-based Mixed Integer Linear Programming

    Mar 17, 2026Adir Morgan, Kiril Solovey, Oren SalzmanRobotic InspectionCombinatorial Optimization

    Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

  11. Coverage First Next Best View for Inspection of Cluttered Pipe Networks Using Mobile Manipulators

    Mar 17, 2026Joshua Raymond Bettles, Jiaxu Wu, Bruno Vilhena Adorno +2Chance-Constrained Motion PlanningRobotic Inspection

    Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. · The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.

  12. Seeing Where to Deploy: Metric RGB-Based Traversability Analysis for Aerial-to-Ground Hidden Space Inspection

    Mar 15, 2026Seoyoung Lee, Shaekh Mohammad Shithil, Durgakant Pushp +2RoboticsRobotic Inspection

    The University of Texas at Austin, USA. · Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.

  13. Caterpillar-Inspired Spring-Based Compressive Continuum Robot for Bristle-based Exploration

    Mar 10, 2026Zhixian Hu, Yu She, Juan WachsRobotic InspectionContinuum Robot Control

    Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.

  14. Autonomous Aerial Non-Destructive Testing: Ultrasound Inspection with a Commercial Quadrotor in an Unstructured Environment

    Mar 4, 2026Ruben Veenstra, Barbara Bazzana, Sander Smits +1Robotic InspectionIndustrial Inspection

    Robotics and Mechatronics lab, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics & Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands. · Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy.

  15. OmniPlanner: Universal Exploration and Inspection Path Planning Across Robot Morphologies

    Mar 4, 2026Angelos Zacharia, Mihir Dharmadhikari, Mohit Singh +1Robotic InspectionRobot Task Planning

    Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7034 Trondheim, Norway

  16. Geometric Look-Angle Shaping Strategy for Enclosed Inspection

    Feb 27, 2026Amit Shivam, Manuel C. R. M. Fernandes, Sergio Vinha +1UAV NavigationRobotic Inspection

    SYSTEC-ISR ARISE, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal

  17. Autonomous Inspection of Power Line Insulators with UAV on an Unmapped Transmission Tower

    Feb 27, 2026Václav Riss, Vít Krátký, Robert Pěnička +1Robotic InspectionIndustrial Inspection

  18. Docking and Persistent Operations for a Resident Underwater Vehicle

    Feb 18, 2026Leonard Günzel, Gabrielė Kasparavičiūtė, Ambjørn Grimsrud Waldum +6Underwater RoboticsAutonomous Underwater Navigation

    Applied Underwater Robotics Lab NTNU Trondheim, Norway

  19. World Model Failure Classification and Anomaly Detection for Autonomous Inspection

    Feb 18, 2026Michelle Ho, Muhammad Fadhil Ginting, Isaac R. Ward +4Robot Failure DetectionRobotic Anomaly Detection

    Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA · Field AI, Mission Viejo, CA 92691 USA

  20. Multimodal Benchmark for Safety Assessment in Industrial Inspection Scenarios

    Jan 29, 2026Zeyi Liu, Shuang Liu, Jihai Min +7Robotic InspectionIndustrial Inspection

    Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Institute for Embodied Intelligence and Robotics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · TetraBOT Intelligence Co., Ltd., Nanjing 210000, China +2