Abstract
Maintenance and inspection systems for future fusion power plants (e.g., STEP and DEMO) are expected to require the integration of hundreds of systems from multiple suppliers, with lifetime expectancies of several decades, where requirements evolve over time and obsolescence management is required. There are significant challenges associated with the integration, deployment, and maintenance of very large-scale robotic systems incorporating devices from multiple suppliers, where each may utilise bespoke, non-standardised control systems and interfaces. Additionally, the unstructured, experimental, or unknown operational conditions frequently result in new or changing system requirements, meaning extension and adaptation are necessary. Whilst existing control frameworks (e.g., ROS, OPC-UA) allow for the robust integration of complex robotic systems, they are not compatible with highly efficient maintenance and extension in the face of changing requirements and obsolescence issues over decades-long periods. We present the CorteX software framework as well as results showing its effectiveness in addressing the above issues, whilst being demonstrated through hardware that is representative of real-world fusion applications.
Highlights
The Joint European Torus (JET) is the world’s largest active magnetic confinement facility (MCF)
Remote Applications in Challenging Environments (RACE) was established in 2016 to gather experience from 25 years and over 40,000 h of remote operations and maintenance of JET, and explore how they could be used to help with wider robotics challenges
The Telescopic Articulated Remote Manipulator (TARM) is located within the RACE workhall surrounded by PTZ cameras
Summary
The Joint European Torus (JET) is the world’s largest active magnetic confinement facility (MCF). The Robot Operating System (ROS) [2] is an open-source, multi-lingual platform, that provides a modular, tool-based, re-usable system, and it is primarily used within the academic community. Over the years, it has gained popularity and, in some cases, has been accepted for non-critical industrial applications where time-criticality, mission-criticality, safety-criticality, and QoS are not required. It has gained popularity and, in some cases, has been accepted for non-critical industrial applications where time-criticality, mission-criticality, safety-criticality, and QoS are not required Given that these requirements are fundamental to most nuclear applications, ROS is not adequate. Integration of ROS components is fairly easy for small-scale projects, but is not a practical solution for large-scale engineering problems, due to the effort required for integration and modification when the system configuration changes (i.e., not extensible)
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