29th Symposium on Fusion Technology (SOFT 2016)

O3C.4 Assessment of navigation technologies for autonomous vehicles in nuclear fusion facilities

6 Sep 2016, 17:40

20m

Meeting Hall V 2nd floor (Prague Congress Centre)

Board: 4

Oral G. Vessel/In-Vessel Engineering and Remote Handling O3C

Speaker

Rodrigo Ventura (Institute for Systems and Robotics)

Description

Nuclear power plants require periodically maintenance, including the remote handling operations of transportation performed by automated guided vehicles (AGV). The navigation system becomes a key issue given the safety constrains of the heavy load to be transported in the complex scenarios, such as the reactor building. This work presents well-known and mature navigation technologies used by AGV in industry. A critical assessment is also presented regarding the performance of these technologies against the specific operational requirements and safety demonstration in the framework of fusion facilities (e.g. ITER and DEMO). The navigation technologies are based in two concepts: a physical path (e.g. wire/inductive guidance, optical line guidance and magnetic tape guidance) and a virtual path (e.g. laser based, motion capture, inertial, magnetic-gyro) to be followed by the AGV during the operations of transportation. Given the costly consequences of a failure, a solution for the navigation shall include more than a single navigation system and, hence, different candidate solutions combining different technologies are proposed and evaluated. All candidate solutions comprise a primary and a secondary navigation system, where the primary is self-sufficient for, at least, all nominal operations, while the secondary is self-sufficient for both nominal and non-nominal operations, e.g. recovery and rescue. The trade-off analysis included a broad range of criteria, organized in the following categories: technical feasibility, robustness against radiation and residual magnetic fields, availability, cost, replacement ability and use of commercial off-the-shelf. Each one of the primary and secondary provide redundancy, such that individual sub-system failure does not compromise navigation. The secondary navigation system, which will serve as back-up to the primary navigation, may be used to estimate the localization of any other vehicle (e.g. rescue vehicle). The assessment process results in a preferred solution, contributing to resilience to unexpected failures and long-term sustainability of the navigation system.