Challenges of telerobotics in a nuclear environment

Jan De Geeter, Marc Decréton, Eric Colon

    Research outputpeer-review

    Abstract

    The introduction of advanced robotics into teleoperation in nuclear environments is very hard. Innovations such as sensor-based control, teleprogramming or virtual reality appear only very slowly in real applications. One of the main causes is the lack of proven reliability of those innovations, which depends primarily on the reliability of the hardware and on the reliability of the teleoperated system in use. Therefore, this paper first briefly reviews the state of the art of the reliability of (instrumentation) hardware under ionizing radiation. Under intense irradiation, only the simplest sensors survive for a reasonable time. Therefore, this paper describes a man-machine interface that assists a human operator in using these sensors reliably to build a geometric environment model. This paper then discusses the problem of man-machine interfacing more in general, and identifies promising research topics for the future.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)5-17
    Number of pages13
    JournalRobotics and Autonomous Systems
    Volume28
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 31 Jul 1999

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Control and Systems Engineering
    • Software
    • General Mathematics
    • Computer Science Applications

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