Intelligent Control and Mobile Robotics Labs.
Flexible Guidance, Navigation and Docking of ITER RH Transport Casks
We are participating in a EURATOM/IST Association supported project
whose goal is to suggest and study transport systems for active and passive in-vessel components of ITER's
tokamak, that do not rely on hard guidance solutions, such as rails.
The work at ISR/IST is carried out by
M. Isabel Ribeiro (project leader),
Pedro Lima,
Pedro Aparício and Renato Ferreira.
An initial conceptual study on the potential advantages of flexible guidance, navigation and
docking
systems, carried out by our team, resulted on the decision by ITER to switch the current
reference design for the Remote Handling Transport Casks from rails to a flexible guidance
and navigation system. We just finished, together with the British company NNC, and the Belgium
representative of the american company AeroGo, the specifications of such a system.
Four papers describing the work done so far are available:
- "Geometric Feasibility of a Flexible Cask Transportation System for ITER", Pedro Lima, M. Isabel Ribeiro,
Pedro Aparício, in Proc. of SOFT 98 (4 pages) --winzipped
postscript file (70 Kbytes)
- "Study of the Motion Schedule for ITER Remote Handling Transport Casks",
M. I. Ribeiro, P. Lima, P. Aparício, R. Ferreira, Proc. of CONTROLO
98, Coimbra, Portugal, 1998. (6 pages) --gzipped
postscript file (84 Kbytes)
- "Conceptual Study on Flexible Guidance and Navigation for ITER Remote Handling
Transport Casks", M. Isabel Ribeiro, Pedro Lima, Pedro Aparício, Renato Ferreira,
in Proc. of SOFE 97 (4 pages) --winzipped postscript file (47 Kbytes)
- "Active Docking of a Transport Cask Subject to 6 Degree of Freedom Misalignments", M. Isabel Ribeiro, Pedro Lima, Pedro Aparício, Renato Ferreira,
in Proc. of SOFE 97 (4 pages) --winzipped postscript file (51 Kbytes)