Telerobotic decontamination and decommissioning with QRobot, a PC-based robot control system

Robotic systems are well suited for decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) tasks in hazardous environments. Advanced semi-autonomous telerobotic solutions for D&D tasks go beyond simple video-based interaction and include virtual reality (VR) interfaces and flexible sensor integration. The capability of those systems range from real-time control tasks to graphical user interface components utilizing video and VR. This paper describes QRobot, a PC-based system for telerobotic D&D operations. The system integrates hardware interfacing, real-time joint level control, sensors, tool control, networking and task level programming as well as video and VR based operator interfaces. The system demonstrates that the personal computer (PC), a cost effective and widely used computing platform, is well suited to the integration of real-time control tasks and advanced user interfaces.