A Framework for Flexible and Autonomous Reliability Tests of Household Appliances Supported by Virtual Planning

The development of a framework for diagnosis and testing in reliability laboratories (life test labs) of household appliances is addressed. The proposed system targets the repetitive task of gathering numerous measurements on products in order to guarantee a standardized and repeatable quality control. The proposed innovation considers the diagnosis and testing station not as a fixed system but as a flexible one, based on mobile robot with sensory and diagnostic skills. The developed framework mainly consists of a service oriented software infrastructure for virtual planning and simulation of inspection tasks, hardware setup composed of an autonomous platform with sensors and actuators, a control system dedicated to navigation and perception. The paper mainly presents the inspection virtual planning system. Some details are then provided on the implementation of a prototypal system for household appliances inspection. Some result in terms of performances of system components are presented in the last part of the paper.