Enhanced Teleoperation Exhibiting Tele-autonomy and Tele-collaboration

This paper presents enhanced remote manipulation of tools for D&D tasks by extending teleoperation with teleautonomy and tele-collaboration. This work builds on a reactive, agent-based control architecture, which is well suited to unstructured and unpredictable environments, and cobot control technology, which implements a virtual fixture that can be used to guide the application of tools with passive force-feedback control. Developed methodologies are tested using simulation, and then planned to be implemented using a structured light sensor and cobot hand controller on a dual-arm system to measure the enhanced performance of key tool operations that are tedious and difficult to perform purely by teleoperation. This work significantly leverages some 2000 hours of operational experience gained during the D&D of the CP-5 reactor at ANL using a dual-arm remote manipulator system, as well as DOE’s investment in the dual-arm system itself, which will serve as a test bed for the proposed investigations.