Distinguished Member of Technical Staff Sandia National Laboratories Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
Sandia National Laboratories has designed and is developing Inspecta (International Nuclear Safeguards Personal Examination and Containment Tracking Assistant), an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled smart digital assistant with robotic support. This innovative tool is designed to assist inspectors in the field by handling tasks that are often seen as monotonous, dangerous, or susceptible to human error. For its initial prototype, Sandia has selected a high-impact activity — the examination of seals — and to aid in this endeavor is crafting functionalities that can be integrated into either a smartphone, the Boston Dynamics' Spot robot, or both. The capabilities being developed for the on-device component include optical character recognition (OCR) for identifying seal numbers, tracking of inspection tasks, OCR for document ingestion, and information retrieval that facilitates a natural question-and-answer interaction with the OCR-processed documents, along with transcription services. On-device large language models have recently been added and are undergoing testing. The integration of the Spot robot enhances the system with features such as voice commands to direct the robot, task-specific autonomy, object-recognition for identifying containers and their seals, and the ability to map out facilities. This poster provides an overview of the Inspecta initiative, detailing the progress made in developing its functionalities, encompassing both the capabilities housed on the device and those enabled through the Spot robot.
