A Dual Arms Robotic Platform Control for Navigation, Inspection and Telemanipulation

Abstract

High intensity hadron colliders and fixed target experiments at CERN require an increasing amount of robotic tele-manipulation interventions to prevent and reduce excessive exposure of maintenance personnel to the radioactive environment. Tele-manipulation tasks are often required on dated radioactive devices which were not conceived to be maintained and handled using standard one arm robotic solutions. Robotic platforms with a level of dexterity that often requires using two robotic arms with a minimum of six degrees of freedom are instead needed for these purposes. In this paper, the control of a novel robust robotic platform able to host and to carry safely a dual-arms robotic system is presented. The arms and the vehicle controls are fully integrated in order to guarantee simplicity to the operators during the realization of the robotic tasks. A novel high-level control architecture for the new robot is shown, as well as a novel low-level safety layer for anti-collision and recovery scenarios. Preliminary results of the system commissioning are presented using CERN accelerator facilities as a use case.