Speaker
Description
Accelerator complexes rely on the seamless operations of many hundreds of highly customised devices working together in a harsh environment. Intelligent robotic systems are becoming essential for inspection, maintenance, and repair tasks – both for the validation of systems before installation as well as during operations. Using robots can increase the safety and machine availability, while performing repetitive and dangerous tasks that humans prefer to avoid or unable to do because of hazards, size constraints or the extreme environment they take place. At CERN, robots are regularly used for inspection of devices and beam lines, validation of equipment, repair operations or regular maintenance as well as decommissioning and post-mortem analysis tasks. A fleet of robots have been developed with specific tooling to suit our needs, including procedures and best practices, and this work presents the main technical developments and features implemented to optimise robots for the use in accelerator environments and to support equipment design of remote maintainable machines. In the future, we imagine using robots in a more autonomous way, while still ensuring safe and robust interventions.
