Self-repairing cities

The University of Leeds, working with Leeds City Council, aims to make Leeds the first city in the world fully maintained by robots as early as 2035. The 2020 Robotics Challenge invited demonstration projects in the following areas:

• "Perceive and patch: vehicles for autonomous inspection, diagnostics, repair and prevention of defects such as potholes
• Perch and repair: remote inspection and maintenance of structures at height, such as bridge inspection
• Plunge and protect: autonomous robots with the ability to perform underwater or underground infrastructure inspection repair, and preventive defect maintenance
• Fire and forget: robots designed to operate indefinitely performing inspection, repair, metering and reporting tasks, such as robotics operating in live water mains
• Construct and confirm: coordination of robot teams to build/print, finish and certify infrastructure from CAD models, using environmentally friendly building materials
• Dismantle and dispose: advanced manipulation in extreme environments to manipulate, cut, separate and unfasten structures, such as infrastructure de-commissioning such as nuclear or wind
• Data and decisions: create, process and interpret data securely for effective, verifiable and trustworthy operation of robots, such as robots to remotely augment building information models."

This signal points towards a future where a wide variety of autonomous vehicles and robots are at work throughout the day and night in cities performing preventive maintenance, routine inspections, and emergency repairs on municipal infrastructure—saving money, improving service and capacity, and improving safety.