Abstract
Intelligent robotic systems are becoming essential for industries, nuclear plants, and for harsh environments in general, such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) particles accelerator complex and experiments. In order to increase safety and machine availability, robots can perform repetitive, unplanned, and dangerous tasks, which humans either prefer to avoid or are unable to carry out due to hazards, size constraints, or the extreme environments in which they take place. A novel robotic framework for autonomous inspections and supervised teleoperations in harsh environments is presented. The proposed framework covers all aspects of a robotic intervention, from the specification and operator training, the choice of the robot and its material in accordance with possible radiological contamination risks, to the realization of the intervention, including procedures and recovery scenarios. The robotic solution proposed in this paper is able to navigate autonomously, inspecting unknown environments in a safe way. A new real-time control system was implemented in order to guarantee a fast response to environmental changes and adaptation to different type of scenarios the robot may find in a semi-structured and hazardous environment. Components of the presented framework are: a novel bilateral master-slave control, a new robotic platform named CERNbot, and an advanced user-friendly multimodal human-robot interface, also used for the operators’ offline training, allowing technicians not expert in robot operation to perform inspection/maintenance tasks. The proposed system has been tested and validated with real robotic interventions in the CERN hazardous particle accelerator complex.
Highlights
The revolution of Industry 4.0 involves a modern manufacturing style, known as Intelligent Manufacturing [1], which focuses on customized production and massive customization instead of the classic massive production
The CERNTAURO solution has been successfully integrated on several robotic arms (Figure 17), as well as the following robots designed and built at CERN: CERNbot v1.0 CERNbot v2.0 CRANEbot Train Inspection Monorail for the LHC [43] Different robots running the CERNTAURO framework have successfully achieved, in assisted teleoperation, dexterous tasks like screwing, sewing, cutting, grasping etc., as well as autonomous inspections in harsh and semi-structured environments (TABLE 7)
The radioactive source had a length of 20 mm and had to be removed from a radioactive transport container, taken out from its support, being integrated into another support and the whole assembly was put in an experimental container that is irradiated by the Proton Synchrotron beam in the frame of the Antimatter Production facility [100] at CERN
Summary
The revolution of Industry 4.0 involves a modern manufacturing style, known as Intelligent Manufacturing [1], which focuses on customized production and massive customization instead of the classic massive production. Operating robots for maintenance in dangerous environments on costly machines requires skilled and well trained, dedicated shift operators [11] This is costly, highly time-consuming and is mainly due to the non-intuitive human robot interfaces present on industrial robot mobile manipulators. A user-friendly human robot interface is required that increases the process transparency [12], reduces the operator’s fatigue and does not require a pool of welltrained robotic operators which, in some cases, are dedicated to a specific robotic task Another crucial aspect to take into account for environments where a quick robotic intervention is needed to increase the machine uptime and reduce the operational cost, is the ability to mitigate incidents during robotic operations.
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