The IFMIF-DONES remote handling control system: Experimental setup for OPC UA integration

Abstract

The devices used to carry out Remote Handling (RH) manipulation tasks in radiation environments address

requirements that are significantly different from common robotic and industrial systems due to the lack of

repetitive operations and incompletely specified control actions. This imposes the need of control with human-inthe-

loop operations. These RH systems are used on facilities such PRIDE, CERN, ESS, ITER or IFMIF-DONES, the

reference used for this work.

For the RH system is crucial to provide high availability, robustness against radiation, haptic devices for

teleoperation and dexterous operation, and smooth coordination and integration with the centralized control

room. To achieve this purpose is necessary to find the best approach towards a standard control framework

capable of providing a standard set of functionalities, tools, interfaces, communications, and data formats to the

different types of mechatronic devices that are usually considered for Remote Handling tasks. This previous

phase of homogenization is not considered in most facilities, which leads towards a costly integration process

during the commissioning phase of the facility.

In this paper, an approach to the IFMIF-DONES RH Control framework with strong standard support based on

protocols such as OPC UA has been described and validated through an experimental setup. This test bench

includes a set of physical devices (PLC, conveyor belt and computers) and a set of OPC UA compatible software

tools, configured and operable from any node of the University of Granada network. This proof-of-concept

mockup provides flexibility to modify the dimension and complexity of the setup by using new virtual or

physical devices connected to a unique backbone. Besides, it will be used to test different aspects such as control

schemes, failure injection, network modeling, predictive maintenance studies, operator training on simulated/

real scenarios, usability or ergonomics of the user interfaces before the deployment. In this contribution, the

results are described and illustrated using a conveyor belt set-up, a small but representative reference used to

validate the RH control concepts here proposed.