• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.41 no.1
• /
• pp.125-134
• /
• 2009

This paper presents details on a tube inspection robotic system and a positioning method of the robot for a steam generator (SG) in nuclear power plants (NPPs). The robotic system is separated into three parts for easy handling, which reduces the radiation exposure during installation. The system has a supporting leg to increase the rigidity of the robot base. Since there are several thousands of tubes to be inspected inside a SG, it is very important to position the tool of the robot at the right tubes even if the robot base is positioned inaccurately during the installation. In order to obtain absolute accuracy of a position, the robot kinematics was mathematically modeled with the modified DH(Denavit-Hartenberg) model and calibrated on site using tube holes as calibration points. To tune the PID gains of a commercial motor driver systematically, the time delay control (TDC) based gain tuning method was adopted. To verify the performance of the robotic system, experiments on a Framatomes 51B Model type SG mockup were undertaken.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2003.10a
• /
• pp.2508-2513
• /
• 2003

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.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.54 no.4
• /
• pp.1374-1381
• /
• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
• /
• v.35S no.2
• /
• pp.137-145
• /
• 1998

In this paper, we propose a tube-hole center detection vision algorithm verifying the position of a tele-controlled robot and providing visual information for increasing reliability and efficiency in the diagnosis of steam generator (SG) tubes in nuclear power plant. A tele-controlled robot plays a role in carrying the probe used in inspecting the integrity of SG tubes. Thus accurately locating a tele-controlled robot on the desired tube-hole center is important issue for reliability of inspection. To do this work, we have to find the tube-hole center locations from the input image. At first, we apply the three-class segmentation method modified for this application. WE extract minimum bounding rectangles (MBRs) in the theresholded binary image. Second, for discriminating between MBR by tube and MBR by noise, we introduce the MBR rejection rules as knowledge-based rule set. MBRs are divided into the very dark region MBRs and the very bright region MBRs. In order to describe the region of complete tube-hole, the MBRs need a process of pairing each other. We then can find the tube-hole center from the paired MBR. For more accurately finding the tube-hole center in several sequential images, the centers of some frames need to be averaged. We tested the performance of our method using hundreds of real images.