Issue link: https://htpgraphics.uberflip.com/i/1385717
The year of 2020 has really emphasised the 'Remote' in Remote Handling (RH). The RH working group has carried on with advancing research unperturbed due to pivoting work onto simulation (https://github.com/ukaea/Glovebox- Simulator) and driving robots remotely. We have continued to engage Glovebox use- case owners to add more details to our plans for demonstrations and deployments while also furthering our research focus. As we conclude phase one we will rapidly reach a baseline concept system for a robotically operated glovebox, which can then act as a practical discussion tool to underpin phase two engagement with Industry. We aim to understand their needs and educate/engage them about the possibilities, strengths and weaknesses of possible technologies, such as applied autonomy for automated inspection. We have also engaged with the SME community to supplement the RH offerings. This has included a smart grasping system using the next generation of glovebox compatible stereo cameras. This has been a very successful collaboration to date, and we hope to collaborate with many more SMEs on the new baselined glovebox to address requirements of our nuclear end users. This year the Remote Inspection Working Group took the ideas, and prototype mobile inspection robot, we created previously, and pushed them towards the maturity required for deployment at an active site. As a result of engagement sessions with RAIN partners early in the year, we targeted the opportunity of deploying an inspection robot in the JET Torus Hall at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. This has driven us to engage with a broad range of stakeholders in UKAEA to ensure the safety, decomissionability, and usefulness, of the mobile robot platform. The specific use case is gathering spatially-mapped gamma activity and spectrum data to verify prior work performed by UKAEA modelling the by-products of JET activity. The platform and experience that will result from our efforts on this deployment will be leveraged in the next phase of RAIN for further inspection missions at Culham and beyond. We presented our progress to a wide audience via a RAIN Webinar in September. This included a demonstration of cross-Hub work on remote autonomous operation for inspection. The demo showed a Jackal AGV in Oxford being set autonomous inspection tasks via a Web interface accessed from a remote location. In the future we will build on the autonomous platform to extend automated capabilities of our inspection platform. We are particularly interested in developing long-term autonomous monitoring (e.g. for change detection) of nuclear sites, and sites from other industries with similar requirements. GUY BURROUGHES NICK HAWES REMOTE HANDLING REMOTE INSPECTION 13 WORKING GROUPS