Development of a Nuclear Steam Generator Tube Inspection/maintenance Robot

This paper presents a nuclear steam generator tube inspection/maintenance robot system. The robot assists in automatic non-destructive testing and the repair of nuclear steam generator tubes welded into a thick tube sheet that caps a hemispherical or quarter-sphere plenum which is a high-radiation area. For easy carriage and installation, the robot system consists of three separable parts: a manipulator, a water-chamber entering and leaving device for the manipulator and a manipulator base pose adjusting device. A software program to control and manage the robotic system has been developed on the NT based OS to increase the usability. The software program provides a robot installation function, a robot calibration function, a managing and arranging function for the eddy-current test, a real time 3-D graphic simulation function which offers remote reality to operators and so on. The image information acquired from the camera attached to the end-effecter is used to calibrate the end-effecter pose error and the time-delayed control algorithm is applied to calculate the optimal PID gain of the position controller. The developed robotic system has been tested in the Ulchin NPP type steam generator mockup in a laboratory.