Control system of a small intelligent inspection robot for nuclear power plant use

Abstract

Since Fukushima nuclear accident, the international society are paying more and more attention on the safety of nuclear power. The healthy monitoring is the most important means for earth warning. In this paper, we developed the control system for an intelligent monitoring robot used in nuclear power plants. The control system is actually a two-level controller, consisting of the host computer and lower computer. The host computer is a traditional PC, supplying the human-computer interface. It is also used for mission planning, control parameters setting, monitoring results processing and displaying, and so on. The lower computer is an ARM embedded controller. It is directly connected to all actuators and sensors. The real-time operation system uc/os-ii is also migrated to the ARM processor. It effectively manages the hardware resource and the multiple tasks in real time. Typical experiments verified the effectiveness and reliability.