Sensor-based interior modeling

Robots and remote systems will play crucial roles in future decontamination and decommissioning (D ampersand D) of nuclear facilities. Many of these facilities, such as uranium enrichment plants, weapons assembly plants, research and production reactors, and fuel recycling facilities, are dormant; there is also an increasing number of commercial reactors whose useful lifetime is nearly over. To reduce worker exposure to radiation, occupational and other hazards associated with D ampersand D tasks, robots will execute much of the work agenda. Traditional teleoperated systems rely on human understanding (based on information gathered by remote viewing cameras) of the work environment to safely control the remote equipment. However, removing the operator from the work site substantially reduces his efficiency and effectiveness. To approach the productivity of a human worker, tasks will be performed telerobotically, in which many aspects of task execution are delegated to robot controllers and other software. This paper describes a system that semi-automatically builds a virtual world for remote D ampersand D operations by constructing 3-D models of a robot's work environment. Planar and quadric surface representations of objects typically found in nuclear facilities are generated from laser rangefinder data with a minimum of human interaction. The surface representations are then incorporated into a task space model that can be viewed and analyzed by the operator, accessed by motion planning and robot safeguarding algorithms, and ultimately used by the operator to instruct the robot at a level much higher than teleoperation