A debris clearance robot for extreme environments

West, Craig; Giuliani, Manuel; Lennox, Barry; Cheah, Wei; Arvin, Farshad; West, Andrew; Watson, Simon

Abstract

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. The need for nuclear decommissioning is increasing globally, as power stations and other facilities utilising nuclear reaches the end of their operational life. Currently the majority of decommissioning tasks are carried out by workers in protective air fed suits, which is slow, expensive and dangerous. The work presented here is the early stages in the development of a flexible mobile manipulator platform, combining a Clearpath Husky, a Universal UR5 manipulator and various sensors. The system will be used for research specifically in the area of exploration of contaminated environments, map building to aid in task planning, and also to investigate manipulation for waste sorting. The aim is to develop a system that can, in the short term, be used in real world tasks but longer term function as a research platform to allow continued research and development. As well as developing a hardware platform, a detailed simulation model is also being developed to allow testing of algorithms in simulation before being deployed on hardware. The use of the simulation model for operator training is also an area that will be investigated in the future. This article focuses on the planned work for developing the system, as well as discussing the progress on the simulation model.

Citation

West, C., Giuliani, M., Lennox, B., Cheah, W., Arvin, F., West, A., & Watson, S. (2019). A debris clearance robot for extreme environments. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 11649 LNAI, 148-159. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23807-0_13

• Journal Article Type: Conference Paper
• Conference Name: TAROS 2019: Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems 2019
• Conference Location: London, UK
• Acceptance Date: Jun 28, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Jun 28, 2019
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2019
• Deposit Date: Nov 27, 2019
• Journal: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
• Print ISSN: 0302-9743
• Electronic ISSN: 1611-3349
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Volume: 11649 LNAI
• Pages: 148-159
• Series ISSN: 1611-3349
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23807-0_13
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/4744555
• Additional Information: First Online: 28 June 2019; Conference Acronym: TAROS; Conference Name: Annual Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems; Conference City: London; Conference Country: United Kingdom; Conference Year: 2019; Conference Start Date: 3 July 2019; Conference End Date: 5 July 2019; Conference Number: 20; Conference ID: taros2019; Conference URL: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/robotics/events/taros2019/