Virtual reality based monitoring and control system for articulated in-vessel inspection arm

Specialized Remote Handling (RH) equipment are required which are controllable with high precision and accuracy for the efficient remote maintenance of tokamaks. These RH systems are not fully autonomous and most of the tasks are carried out by the trained RH operators. As these RH operations may directly impact the availability of the machine for the plasma experiments, huge efforts are being made to equip the RH operators with the advanced technologies that provide the real knowledge and interactions with the operating environment without being physically present. It can be very beneficial for the offline training and also during the RH operations. In this paper, a control mechanism is presented for the Virtual Reality (VR) based monitoring and controlling of the articulated in-vessel inspection arm. This arm is a six axis RH equipment capable of visual inspection inside the torus. The presented work addresses the challenges of achieving accurate mapping of the joints with the VR model. The kinematics based on the D-H parameters has been used. A control application is executed to communicate the joint pose and orientation along with the velocities from the VR simulations to the servo control system of the RH equipment. For the continuous tracking of the arm, the VR model is periodically updated with the values read from the encoders mounted in the articulated arm. In the event of the failure of equipment controller drives, it is important to recover the joint positions. The rescue of the arm can be planned using the VR platform. The initial performance tests show a low latency with precise and accurate control over the RH equipment. The system can also be used as a training platform for the RH operators.