2 research outputs found
Lessons learned: Symbiotic autonomous robot ecosystem for nuclear environments
Nuclear facilities have a regulatory requirement to measure radiation levels within Post Operational Cleanout (POCO) around nuclear facilities each year, resulting in a trend towards robotic deployments to gain an improved understanding during nuclear decommissioning phases. The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority supports the view that human-in-the-loop robotic deployments are a solution to improve procedures and reduce risks within radiation haracterisation of nuclear sites. We present a novel implementation of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) deployed in an analogue nuclear environment, comprised of a multi-robot team coordinated by a human-in-the-loop operator through a digital twin interface. The development of the CPS created efficient partnerships across systems including robots, digital systems and human. This was presented as a multi-staged mission within an inspection scenario for the heterogeneous Symbiotic Multi-Robot Fleet (SMuRF). Symbiotic interactions were achieved across the SMuRF where robots utilised automated collaborative governance to work together where a single robot would face challenges in full characterisation of radiation. Key contributions include the demonstration of symbiotic autonomy and query-based learning of an autonomous mission supporting scalable autonomy and autonomy as a service. The coordination of the CPS was a success and displayed further challenges and improvements related to future multi-robot fleets
Addressing Non-Intervention Challenges via Resilient Robotics Utilizing a Digital Twin
Multi-robot systems face challenges in reducing human interventions as they
are often deployed in dangerous environments. It is therefore necessary to
include a methodology to assess robot failure rates to reduce the requirement
for costly human intervention. A solution to this problem includes robots with
the ability to work together to ensure mission resilience. To prevent this
intervention, robots should be able to work together to ensure mission
resilience. However, robotic platforms generally lack built-in
interconnectivity with other platforms from different vendors. This work aims
to tackle this issue by enabling the functionality through a bidirectional
digital twin. The twin enables the human operator to transmit and receive
information to and from the multi-robot fleet. This digital twin considers
mission resilience and autonomous and human-led decision making to enable the
resilience of a multi-robot fleet. This creates the cooperation, corroboration,
and collaboration of diverse robots to leverage the capability of robots and
support recovery of a failed robot.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, preprint conference submission for ICRA 202