Current European refineries and civil infrastructures, like tunnels and bridges, are ageing, and therefore gradually become deteriorated, especially taking into consideration the current and future economic situation in Europe where large investments in renewing infrastructures are not foreseen. Then, it is paramount important to increase the efficiency and quality of inspection and maintenance activities in order to keep the necessary safety levels in these ageing infrastructures. To overcome this important challenge, PILOTING proposes the adaptation, integration, and demonstration of robotic solutions, in an integrated platform, which will be tested and evaluated in three large-scale pilots: refineries (Oil&Gas sector), bridges/viaducts and tunnels (Civil/Transport Infrastructure sector) with the involvement of all the actors that conform the full value chain. The developed platform will: demonstrate the application of robotics at scale in the domain of Inspection and Maintenance (I&M), reduce end-user commercial risks on the deployment of robotics in the sector, demonstrate capabilities and improve understanding of robotics uptake value, develop and support the related ecosystem around the piloting I&M operations, as well as, contribute to industrial standards in robotics for I&M. To achieve the above, PILOTING will develop an advanced robotic-based platform that will be deployed in the three industrial scenarios and demonstrate the real value towards the inspection and maintenance community as well as its high level socio-economic impact when applied at scale. PILOTING will establish large-scale pilots in real industrial environments to directly reply to main I&M challenges through the demonstration of: increasing rate of inspection and maintenance tasks, improving coverage and performance, decreasing costs and time of operations, improving inspection quality and increasing safety of operators.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is expected to play a predominant role in the management of the transport infrastructure. Yet, SHM techniques continue to rely on point-based, as opposed to spatial, sensing requiring a dense network of these point-sensors increasing considerably the monitoring cost. Additionally, commercially available, strain sensors cannot measure strains beyond 1% to 2% and, thus, are not able to provide an alarm for an imminent catastrophe. SENSKIN aims to: (a) develop a dielectric-elastomer and micro-electronics-based skin-like sensing solution for the structural monitoring of the transport infrastructure that will offer spatial sensing of reversible (repeated) strains in the range of 0.012% to more than 10%, that requires little power to operate, is easy to install on an irregular surface, is low cost compared to existing sensors, allows simple signal processing and includes the ability of self-monitoring and self-reporting. (b) use the new and emerging technology of Delay Tolerant Network to secure that strain measurements acquired through the 'sensing skin' will reach the base station even under extreme environmental conditions and natural disaster events such as, high winds or an earthquake, where some communication networks could become inoperable. (c) develop a Decision-Support-System for proactive condition-based structural intervention under operating loads and intervention after extreme events. It will be based on an accurate structural assessment based on input from the strain sensors in (a) above and will examine the life-cycle economic, social and environmental implications of the feasible rehabilitation options and the resilience of the infrastructure to future changes in traffic demand that these options offer. (d) implement the above in the case of bridges and test, refine, evaluate and benchmark the monitoring system (integrated a and b) and package (integrated a, b and c) on actual bridges.