Towards advanced robotic manipulation for nuclear decommissioning: A pilot study on tele-operation and autonomy
Paper in proceeding, 2016

We present early pilot-studies of a new international project, developing advanced robotics to handle nuclear waste. Despite enormous remote handling requirements, there has been remarkably little use of robots by the nuclear industry. The few robots deployed have been directly teleoperated in rudimentary ways, with no advanced control methods or autonomy. Most remote handling is still done by an aging workforce of highly skilled experts, using 1960s style mechanical Master-Slave devices. In contrast, this paper explores how novice human operators can rapidly learn to control modern robots to perform basic manipulation tasks; also how autonomous robotics techniques can be used for operator assistance, to increase throughput rates, decrease errors, and enhance safety. We compare humans directly teleoperating a robot arm, against human-supervised semi-autonomous control exploiting computer vision, visual servoing and autonomous grasping algorithms. We show how novice operators rapidly improve their performance with training; suggest how training needs might scale with task complexity; and demonstrate how advanced autonomous robotics techniques can help human operators improve their overall task performance. An additional contribution of this paper is to show how rigorous experimental and analytical methods from human factors research, can be applied to perform principled scientific evaluations of human test-subjects controlling robots to perform practical manipulative tasks.

Grippers

Robot kinematics

Radioactive pollution

Stacking

Grasping

Service robots

Author

Naresh Marturi

University of Birmingham

Alireza Rastegarpanah

University of Birmingham

Chie Takahashi

University of Birmingham

M. Adjigble

University of Birmingham

Rustam Stolkin

University of Birmingham

Sebastian Zurek

University of Birmingham

Marek Kopicki

University of Birmingham

Mohammed Talha

University of Birmingham

Jeff Kuo

National Nuclear Laboratory

Yasemin Bekiroglu

University of Birmingham

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation for Humanitarian Applications (RAHA)


978-1-5090-5203-5 (ISBN)

1st International Conference on Robotics and Automation for Humanitarian Applications, RAHA 2016
Kerala, India,

Subject Categories

Mechanical Engineering

Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

DOI

10.1109/RAHA.2016.7931866

More information

Latest update

5/25/2023