Design of modular robot system for maintenance tasks in hazardous facilities and environments

Abstract

In the hazardous environments present in particle accelerators and nuclear facilities require maintenance and specific type of interventions. The maintenance task by the intervening personnel are planned to ensure personal safety but they are sometimes exposed to residual radiation. Hence inclusion of robotic systems into these environmental conditions are being encouraged to increase the availability of the facility and reduce personal radiation doses. However, the environment and tasks required present challenging conditions for robotic systems in terms of design, architecture, task planning and execution. This paper presents and addresses the hardware and software design choice of a modular robotic system as solution to overcome the challenges and presents a prototype heterogeneous modular robot system (SMART). The simulation results of robot configurations overcoming the challenges is also presented.