Overview of the ITER remote maintenance design and of the development activities in Europe

Damiani, Carlo; Palmer, J.; Takeda, Nobukazu; Annino, C.; Balague, Susagna; Bates, Philip K.; Bernal, Susan A.; Cornella, J.; Dubus, Gregory; Esqué, Salvador; Gonzalez, C.; Ilkei, T.; Lewczanin, M.; Locke, Darren R.; Mont, L.; Perrier, B.; Puiu, Adrian; Ruiz, Emilio Olías; Shuff, Robin; Ven, N. Van De; Hille, C. Van; Uffelen, Marco Van; Choi, Changhwan; Friconneau, J.P.; Hamilton, David; Martin, John P.; Murakami, Shin; Reichle, R.; Cuevas, J. Sanchez; Maruyama, T.; Noguchi, Yuto; Saito, M.

doi:10.1016/j.fusengdes.2018.04.085

Cited by 21 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…This suggests these two methods are more suitable for applications in which minimising the movement of the robot is a higher priority than the time taken to carry out the exploration. This is particularly relevant in the nuclear industry, where it is important to preserve the components of the robots for as long as possible [16]. When components wear out, repairing the equipment can be expensive and delay other operations being carried out in the environment.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Environment Guided Approach for Exploration of Complex Environments

Butters

Jonasson

Stuart-Smith

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

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Remote inspection of a complex environment is a difficult, time consuming task for human operators to perform. The need to manually avoid obstacles whilst considering other performance factors i.e. time taken, joint effort and information gained represents significant challenges to continuous operation. This paper proposes an autonomous robotic solution for exploration of an unknown, complex environment using a high DoF robot arm with an eye in hand depth sensor. The main contribution of this work is a new strategy to find the next best view by evaluating frontier regions of the map to maximise coverage, in contrast to many current approaches which densely sample joint or workspace configurations of the robot. Multiple utility functions were evaluated that showed different behaviours. Our results indicated that the presented algorithm can explore an arbitrary environment efficiently while optimising various performance criteria based on the utility function chosen, application constraints and the desires of the user.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Environment Guided Approach for Exploration of Complex Environments

Butters

Jonasson

Stuart-Smith

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

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Section: Robotics For Extreme Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research into nuclear fusion has also relied heavily on robotics in the last 30 years, [4] and once ready for use generating energy, the fusion sector will be entirely dependent on robotic remote maintenance solutions due to the high radiation levels completely precluding human access to many facilities. [5,6] The multitude of legacy nuclear installations that exist around the world also provide a formidable challenge in terms of their decommissioning, with the UK legacy nuclear facilities alone projected to take over 100 years to fully decommission, costing between £100 and 200 billion without major technological improvements. [7] Nuclear decommissioning, however, is still an essential task due to the many health risks associated with nuclear assets around the world.…”

Section: Robotics For Extreme Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modular Robots for Enabling Operations in Unstructured Extreme Environments

Sayed

Roberts

Donaldson

et al. 2022

Advanced Intelligent Systems

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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.

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“…These robotic solutions, though, are not designed to be adapted to an existing environment, but the facility itself is being developed to be robot-friendly. Between the robotic systems of ITER [26] can be found a blanket remote handling system [27], a divertor remote handling system [28], a cask and plug remote handling system [29], an in vessel viewing system [30], a neutral beam remote handling system [31] and a remote handling for hot cell [5]. This systems have to work in areas with high radioactivity, as the blanket remote handling system which it will be operated in a high radiation environment (250 Gy/h max.)…”

Section: B Existing Robotic Systems For Radioactive Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodal Human-Robot Interface for Accessible Remote Robotic Interventions in Hazardous Environments

et al. 2019

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Human-Robot Interfaces have a key role in the design of secure and efficient robotic systems. Great effort has been put during the past decades on the design of advanced interfaces for domestic and industrial robots. However, robots for intervention in unplanned and hazardous scenarios still need further research, especially when the mission requires the use of multiple robotic systems, to obtain an acceptable level of usability and safety. This paper describes the design and the software engineering process behind the development of a modular and multimodal Human-Robot Interface for intervention with a cooperative team of robots, as well as its validation and commissioning, as it is being used in real operations at CERN's accelerators complex. The proposed Human-Robot Interface allows the control of a heterogeneous set of robots homogeneously, providing the operator, among other features, with live scripting functionalities which can be programmed and adapted in run-time, for example, to increase operator's multi-tasking in a multi-agent scenario. The operator is given the capability to enter in the control loop between the HRI and the robot and customize the control commands according to the operation. To provide such functionalities, well-defined software development approaches have been adopted, for guaranteeing the modularity and the safety of the system during its continuous development. The paper describes the modules offered by the HRI, such as the multimodality, multi-robot control, safety, operators training, and communications architecture, among others. The HRI and the CERN Robotic Framework where it belongs are designed in a modular manner, in order to be able to adapt both, software and hardware architecture in a short time, to the next planned mission. Results present the experience gained with the system, demonstrating a high level of usability, learnability and safety when operated by both, non-experts and qualified robotic operators. The multimodal user interface has demonstrated to be very accurate and secure, providing a unique system to control, in a teleoperated or supervised manner, both single and multiple heterogeneous mobile manipulators. At the moment of writing, the user interface has been successfully used in 100 real interventions in radioactive industrial environments. The presented HRI is a novel research contribution in terms of multimodality, adaptability and modularity for mobile manipulator robotic teams in radioactive environments, especially for its software architecture, as part of the CERN Robotic Framework.

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Overview of the ITER remote maintenance design and of the development activities in Europe

Cited by 21 publications

References 12 publications

Efficient Environment Guided Approach for Exploration of Complex Environments

Efficient Environment Guided Approach for Exploration of Complex Environments

Modular Robots for Enabling Operations in Unstructured Extreme Environments

Multimodal Human-Robot Interface for Accessible Remote Robotic Interventions in Hazardous Environments

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