Abstract
In this work, we address the estimation, planning, control and mapping problems to allow a small quadrotor to autonomously inspect the interior of hazardous damaged nuclear sites. These algorithms run onboard on a computationally limited CPU. We investigate the effect of varying illumination on the system performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully autonomous system of this size and scale applied to inspect the interior of a full scale mock-up of a Primary Containment Vessel (PCV). The proposed solution opens up new ways to inspect nuclear reactors and to support nuclear decommissioning, which is well known to be a dangerous, long and tedious process. Experimental results with varying illumination conditions show the ability to navigate a full scale mock-up PCV pedestal and create a map of the environment, while concurrently avoiding obstacles.
D. Thakur, G. Loianno—These authors contributed equally.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the Richard Garcia and Monica Garcia from SwRI who enabled us to conduct these experiments in PCV mock-up at the San Antonio, TX facility. This work was supported by the TEPCO L99048MEC grant, Qualcomm Research, ARL grants W911NF-08-2-0004, W911NF-17-2-0181, ONR grants N00014-07-1-0829, N00014-14-1-0510, ARO grant W911NF-13-1-0350, NSF grants IIS-1426840, IIS-1138847, DARPA grants HR001151626, HR0011516850. This work was supported in part by C-BRIC, one of six centers in JUMP, a Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) program sponsored by DARPA.
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Thakur, D., Loianno, G., Liu, W., Kumar, V. (2020). Nuclear Environments Inspection with Micro Aerial Vehicles: Algorithms and Experiments. In: Xiao, J., Kröger, T., Khatib, O. (eds) Proceedings of the 2018 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics. ISER 2018. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33950-0_17
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