• 대한전기학회논문지:시스템및제어부문D
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• 제54권9호
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• pp.556-558
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• 2005

The effect of high irradiation on inspection systems in a nuclear power plant can be severe, especially to electronic components such as control hoards. The effect may lead to a critical malfunction or trouble to a underwater robot for inspection and maintenance of nuclear reactor. However, if information on the total accumulated dose on the sensitive parts of the robot is available, a prediction of robot's behavior in radiation environments becomes possible. To know how much radiation the robot has encountered, a dosimeter to measure the total accumulated dose is necessary. This paper describes the development effort of a dual radiation monitoring system using a SiC diode as a dose-rate meter and a p-type power MOSFET as a dose meter. This attempt using two sensors which detect same radiation improves reliability and stability at high intensity radiation detection in nuclear facilities. It uses the concept of diversity and redundancy.

• 대한전자공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한전자공학회 2003년도 하계종합학술대회 논문집 Ⅳ
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• pp.2259-2262
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• 2003

This paper describes visual tracking procedure of the underwater mobile robot for nuclear reactor vessel inspection, which is required to find the foreign objects such as loose parts. The yellowish underwater robot body tend to present a big contrast to boron solute cold water of nuclear reactor vessel, tinged with indigo by Cerenkov effect. In this paper, we have found and tracked the positions of underwater mobile robot using the two color informations, yellow and indigo. The center coordinates extraction procedures is as follows. The first step is to segment the underwater robot body to cold water with indigo background. From the RGB color components of the entire monitoring image taken with the color CCD camera, we have selected the red color component. In the selected red image, we extracted the positions of the underwater mobile robot using the following process sequences: binarization labelling, and centroid extraction techniques. In the experiment carried out at the Youngkwang unit 5 nuclear reactor vessel, we have tracked the center positions of the underwater robot submerged near the cold leg and the hot leg way, which is fathomed to 10m deep in depth.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 제어로봇시스템학회 1990년도 한국자동제어학술회의논문집(국제학술편); KOEX, Seoul; 26-27 Oct. 1990
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• pp.1082-1086
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• 1990

This paper gives an account of teleoperated mobile robot system which is intended to operate in hostile environments where human access is limited or prohibited. A prototype mobile robot equipped with manipulator was designed and initial tests were made in laboratory environment. Test results, yet preliminary, have been encouraging for further research efforts. Future plans emerging from these initial results are also summarized.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 제어로봇시스템학회 1997년도 한국자동제어학술회의논문집; 한국전력공사 서울연수원; 17-18 Oct. 1997
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• pp.1696-1699
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• 1997

The robot mainpulator for inspection of pressurizer in the nuclear power plant has been developed, which consists of four parts : 2 arms, movable gripper, base frame, contorl console. To extract the damaged electric heating rod inside pressurizer, the gripper has been developed using wire lope and self-locking mechanism. for the examination of the structural stability of the robot manipulator, stress analysis is performed by using the ANSYS code.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제54권6호
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• pp.2198-2203
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• 2022

As robotics become more sophisticated, there are a growing number of generic systems being used for routine tasks in nuclear environments to reduce risk to radiation workers. The nuclear sector has called for more commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) devices and components to be used in preference to nuclear specific hardware, enabling robotic operations to become more affordable, reliable, and abundant. To ensure reliable operation in nuclear environments, particularly in high-gamma facilities, it is important to quantify the tolerance of electronic systems to ionizing radiation. To deliver their full potential to end-users, mobile robots require sophisticated autonomous behaviors and sensing, which requires significant computational power. A popular choice of computing system, used in low-cost mobile robots for nuclear environments, is the UP Core single board computer. This work presents estimates of the total ionizing dose that the UP Core running the Robot Operating System (ROS) can withstand, through gamma irradiation testing using a Co-60 source. The units were found to fail on average after 111.1 ± 5.5 Gy, due to faults in the on-board power management circuitry. Its small size and reasonable radiation tolerance make it a suitable candidate for robots in nuclear environments, with scope to use shielding to enhance operational lifetime.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제56권5호
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• pp.1913-1924
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• 2024

This paper presents the design and operation of an autonomous robot for pyroprocess automation, which requires unique approaches beyond those used in industrial applications to achieve the desired performance. Maintaining an extremely dry atmosphere is crucial to handle various materials, including chloride, and an autonomous system ensures this dry environment. The drying room dehumidifier was carefully selected and designed to generate dry air, and different types of dry air conditioning performance were evaluated, including assessing worker accessibility inside the mock-up to determine the system's feasibility. Containers used for process materials were modified to fit the gripper system of the gantry robot for automation. The loading and unloading of process materials in each equipment were automatically performed to connect the process equipment with the robotic system. The gantry robot primarily operated through macro motion to approach waypoints containing process materials, eliminating the need for precise approach motion. The robot's tapered jaw design allowed it to grasp the target object even with imperfect positioning. Robot motions were programmed using a robot simulator for initial positioning and motion planning, and real accuracy was tested in a mock-up facility using the OPC platform.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제54권4호
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• pp.1374-1381
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• 2022

Under the influence of nuclear radiation, the reliability of steam generators (SGs) is an important factor in the efficiency and safety of nuclear power plant (NPP) reactors. Motion planning that remotely manipulates an SG mobile tube-inspection robot to inspect SG heat transfer tubes is the mainstream trend of NPP robot development. To achieve motion planning, conditional traversal is usually used for base position optimization, and then the A^* algorithm is used for path planning. However, the proposed approach requires considerable processing time and has a single expansion during path planning and plan paths with many turns, which decreases the working speed of the robot. Therefore, to reduce the calculation time and improve the efficiency of motion planning, modifications such as the matrix method, improved parent node, turning cost, and improved expanded node were proposed in this study. We also present a comprehensive evaluation index to evaluate the performance of the improved algorithm. We validated the efficiency of the proposed method by planning on a tube sheet with square-type tube arrays and experimenting with Model SG.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 제어로봇시스템학회 1996년도 한국자동제어학술회의논문집(국내학술편); 포항공과대학교, 포항; 24-26 Oct. 1996
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• pp.511-515
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• 1996

A remote controlled mobile robot system has been developed and tested to monitor the radiation area in the nuclear power plant. The mobile robot system operates according to car-driving-like commands and is capable of radiation measurement and visual inspection in unmanned situations under radiation. The robot system is equipped with a radiation sensor and two cameras with appropriate illumination set-ups. The camera with auto-focus function and 8-times zoom lens is mounted on the pan/tilt rotational base and the other is mounted on the front panel of the robot system. All commands regarding the motion of the mobile robot and various sensors are given through the monitoring system which is designed to provide an integrated man-machine interface.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제46권3호
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• pp.439-446
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• 2014

An amphibious inspection robot system (hereafter AIROS) is being developed to visually inspect the in-containment refueling storage water tank (hereafter IRWST) strainer in APR1400 instead of a human diver. Four IRWST strainers are located in the IRWST, which is filled with boric acid water. Each strainer has 108 sub-assembly strainer fin modules that should be inspected with the VT-3 method according to Reg. guide 1.82 and the operation manual. AIROS has 6 thrusters for submarine voyage and 4 legs for walking on the top of the strainer. An inverse kinematic algorithm was implemented in the robot controller for exact walking on the top of the IRWST strainer. The IRWST strainer has several top cross braces that are extruded on the top of the strainer, which can be obstacles of walking on the strainer, to maintain the frame of the strainer. Therefore, a robot leg should arrive at the position beside the top cross brace. For this reason, we used an image processing technique to find the top cross brace in the sole camera image. The sole camera image is processed to find the existence of the top cross brace using the cross edge detection algorithm in real time. A 5-DOF robot arm that has multiple camera modules for simultaneous inspection of both sides can penetrate narrow gaps. For intuitive presentation of inspection results and for management of inspection data, inspection images are stored in the control PC with camera angles and positions to synthesize and merge the images. The synthesized images are then mapped in a 3D CAD model of the IRWST strainer with the location information. An IRWST strainer mock-up was fabricated to teach the robot arm scanning and gaiting. It is important to arrive at the designated position for inserting the robot arm into all of the gaps. Exact position control without anchor under the water is not easy. Therefore, we designed the multi leg robot for the role of anchoring and positioning. Quadruped robot design of installing sole cameras was a new approach for the exact and stable position control on the IRWST strainer, unlike a traditional robot for underwater facility inspection. The developed robot will be practically used to enhance the efficiency and reliability of the inspection of nuclear power plant components.

• 한국정밀공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국정밀공학회 2004년도 추계학술대회 논문집
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• pp.1327-1330
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• 2004

An underwater robotic system has been developed and applied to visual inspection of reactor vessel internals. The Korea Electric Power Robot for Visual Test (KeproVt) consists of an underwater robot, a vision processor-based measuring unit, a master control station and a servo control station. The robot guided by the control station with the measuring unit can be controlled to have any motion at any position in the reactor vessel with $\pm$1 cm positioning and $\pm$2 degrees heading accuracies with enough precision to inspect reactor internals. A simple and fast installation process is emphasized in the developed system. The developed robotic system was successfully deployed at the Younggwang Nuclear Unit 1 for the visual inspection of reactor internals.