Design and implementation of visual inspection system handed in tokamak flexible in-vessel robot

Abstract

In-vessel viewing system (IVVS) is a fundamental tool among the remote handling systems for ITER, which is used to providing information on the status of the in-vessel components. The basic functional requirement of in-vessel visual inspection system is to perform a fast intervention with adequate optical resolution. In this paper, we present the software and hardware solution, which is designed and implemented for tokamak in-vessel viewing system that installed on end-effector of flexible in-vessel robot working under vacuum and high temperature. The characteristic of our in-vessel viewing system consists of two parts: binocular heterogeneous vision inspection tool and first wall scene emersion based augment virtuality. The former protected with water-cooled shield is designed to satisfy the basic functional requirement of visual inspection system, which has the capacity of large field of view and high-resolution for detection precision. The latter, achieved by overlaying first wall tiles images onto virtual first wall scene model in 3D virtual reality simulation system, is designed for convenient, intuitive and realistic-looking visual inspection instead of viewing the status of first wall only by real-time monitoring or off-line images sequences. We present the modular division of system, each of them in smaller detail, and go through some of the design choices according to requirements of in-vessel visual inspection task.