Future-Proofing Robotic Maintenance and Inspection Systems by Abstraction and Standardisation of Distributed Communications

Future-Proofing Robotic Maintenance and Inspection Systems by Abstraction and Standardisation of Distributed Communications

Future-Proofing Robotic Maintenance and Inspection Systems by Abstraction and Standardisation of Distributed Communications 150 150 UKAEA Opendata
UKAEA-CCFE-PR(20)133

Future-Proofing Robotic Maintenance and Inspection Systems by Abstraction and Standardisation of Distributed Communications

Future experimental scientific facilities, energy generation assets, and nuclear decommissioning facilities will require increasing levels of remote maintenance, which must be facilitated by robotic systems. Moreover, these long-lived (30+ years) maintenance systems will, themselves need to maintained and upgraded in order to deal with lifespan issues, obsolescence, and changing requirements. Existing remote maintenance architectures are highly coupled, often monolithic systems which may evolve over time and can become unmanageable due to bespoke, local interface adaptations which become prohibitively expensive to rectify. We propose an architecture, enabled by a novel communication protocol, which enables scalable standardisation, and a novel distribution method that is suitable for mixed real-time applications of realistic network infrastructure. The architecture has been demonstrated in a laboratory environment, will be further deployed in real-world applications, and is directly applicable to many other robotics scenarios.

Collection:
Journals
Journal:
Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Publisher:
Elsevier