Operations in extreme and hostile environments, such as offshore oil and gas production, nuclear decommissioning, nuclear facility maintenance, deep mining, space exploration, and subsea applications, require the execution of sophisticated tasks. In nuclear environments, robotic systems have advanced significantly over the past years but still suffer from task failures caused by informational and physical uncertainty of the highly unstructured nature of the environment and exasperated by the time constraints imposed by high radiation levels. Herein, a survey is presented of current robotic systems that can operate in such extreme environments and offer a novel approach to solving the challenges they impose, encapsulated by the mission statement of providing structure in unstructured environments and exemplified by a new self‐assembling modular robotic system, the Connect‐R.
We introduce vPlanSim, an open source tool to aid in AI PDDL development. This tool is primarily aimed at researchers and developers who need a visual representation of their planning problem so that they can make useful insights into the performance of their system, and also to naturally convey their system to others. It is an open-source tool which allows a user to quickly and easily visualise a target environment to generate the problem files and also to visualise a plan. It is particularly well suited to spatial planning problems. This paper will demonstrate vPlanSim on 2D and 3D planning problems. vPlanSim is based on a small and carefully considered set of dependencies such as VTK and PyQt. It can be set up on different platforms and compiled from source with minimal effort. The code is and maintained via a clear code review mechanism. We welcome contributions from the open-source community.
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