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Abstract

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed and de ployed a telerobotic approach for the remote retrieval of hazardous and radioactive wastes from underground storage tanks. The teler obotic system, built by SparAerospace Ltd., is capable of dislodging and removing sludge and gravel-like wastes without endangering the human operators through direct contact with the environment. Working in partnership with Washington University, ORNL is im plementing an event-based planner/Function-Based Sharing Con troller (FBSC) as an integral part of their overall telerobotic archi tecture. These aspects of the system enable the seamless union of the human operator and an autonomous controller in such a way as to emphasize safety without loss of performance. The cooperation between ORNL, Spar, and Washington University requires an open and modular control software architecture to enable the parallel de velopment of various components of the system. ControlShell has been used as the underlying software architecture to help meet these criteria of generality and modularity.

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References

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A Modular Telerobotic Architecture for Waste Retrieval and Remediation

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