ITER's working environment is characterized by extreme conditions, that deem maintenance and inspection tasks to be carried out through remote handling. 3D Node is a hardware/software module that extracts critical information from the remote environment during fine alignment tasks using an eye-in-hand camera system and updates the models behind the virtual reality-based remote handling platform. In this work we develop a retro-reflective marker-based version of 3D Node that estimates the pose of a planar target, the knuckle of the cassette locking system, using the markers attached to its surface. We demonstrate a pin-tool insertion task using these methods. Results show that our approach works reliably with a single low-resolution camera and outperforms the previously researched stereo depth estimation based approaches. We conclude that retro-reflective marker-based tracking has the potential to be a key enabler for remote handling operations in ITER.
@article{arxiv.2007.12514,
title = {Robust Vision Using Retro Reflective Markers for Remote Handling in ITER},
author = {Laura Goncalves Ribeiro and Olli J. Suominen and Sari Peltonen and Emilio Ruiz Morales and Atanas Gotchev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.12514},
year = {2020}
}