Mobile Robot Navigation for Remote Handling operations in ITER

This paper briefly summarizes the work related with mobile robotics developed by IST on the field of remote handling operations to be carried out in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) by a transfer casks system. The transport operations of contaminated and heavy loads inside ITER buildings requires optimized trajectories. Approaches of path planning and trajectory optimization based on geometric constrains and also based on rigid body dynamics were studied and tested in the cluttered scenarios of ITER. The localization problem of mobile robots was also addressed, with a novel approach of using an optimized sensor network installed on the scenario with probabilistic algorithms to estimate, in real time, the pose of a vehicle, or a set of vehicles, operating in the scenario. The navigation is also considered with three modes of operation: automatic, semi-automatic and manual. Virtual Reality Systems and Human Machine Interfaces are under development. A summary of results achieved so far are presented in the paper.