Simulating Ionising Radiation in Gazebo for Robotic Nuclear Inspection Challenges

Thomas Wright; Andrew West; Mauro Licata; Nick Hawes; Barry Lennox

doi:10.3390/robotics10030086

Simulating Ionising Radiation in Gazebo for Robotic Nuclear Inspection Challenges

Robotics ◽

10.3390/robotics10030086 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 86

Author(s):

Thomas Wright ◽

Andrew West ◽

Mauro Licata ◽

Nick Hawes ◽

Barry Lennox

Keyword(s):

Operating System ◽

Radiation Transport ◽

Ionising Radiation ◽

Robotic Systems ◽

Radioactive Materials ◽

Robot Operating System ◽

Transport Code ◽

Radiation Sources ◽

Reduce Risk ◽

Over Time

The utilisation of robots in hazardous nuclear environments has potential to reduce risk to humans. However, historical use has been largely limited to specific missions rather than broader industry-wide adoption. Testing and verification of robotics in realistic scenarios is key to gaining stakeholder confidence but hindered by limited access to facilities that contain radioactive materials. Simulations offer an alternative to testing with actual radioactive sources, provided they can readily describe the behaviour of robotic systems and ionising radiation within the same environment. This work presents a quick and easy way to generate simulated but realistic deployment scenarios and environments which include ionising radiation, developed to work within the popular robot operating system compatible Gazebo physics simulator. Generated environments can be evolved over time, randomly or user-defined, to simulate the effects of degradation, corrosion or to alter features of certain objects. Interaction of gamma radiation sources within the environment, as well as the response of simulated detectors attached to mobile robots, is verified against the MCNP6 Monte Carlo radiation transport code. The benefits these tools provide are highlighted by inclusion of three real-world nuclear sector environments, providing the robotics community with opportunities to assess the capabilities of robotic systems and autonomous functionalities.

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Robot Operating System 2

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems ◽

10.1177/1729881418770011 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 15 (3) ◽

pp. 172988141877001 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Vincenzo DiLuoffo ◽

William R Michalson ◽

Berk Sunar

Keyword(s):

Operating System ◽

Autonomous Vehicles ◽

Human Life ◽

Robotic System ◽

Robotic Systems ◽

Robot Operating System ◽

Distributed Services ◽

Trade Offs ◽

System 2 ◽

Deployed Systems

It is no secret that robotic systems are expanding into many human roles or are augmenting human roles. The Robot Operating System is an open-source standard for the robotic industry that enables locomotion, manipulation, navigation, and recognition tasks by integrating sensors, motors, and controllers into reusable modules over a distributed messaging architecture. As reliance on robotic systems increases, these systems become high value targets, for example, in autonomous vehicles where human life is at risk. As Robot Operating System has become a de facto standard for many robotic systems, the security of Robot Operating System becomes an important consideration for deployed systems. The original Robot Operating System implementations were not designed to mitigate the security risks associated with hostile actors. Robot Operating System 2, the next generation of the Robot Operating System, addresses this shortcoming, leveraging Data Distributed Services for its messaging architecture and Data Distributed Services security extension for its data protection in motion. This article provides a systematic review of Robot Operating System 2 and identifies potential risks for this new robotic system paradigm. A Robot Operating System 2 robotic system is viewed as a series of layers from the hardware that include sensors, motors, and controllers to the software layers, which include the operating system, security services, protocols, messaging, and the cognitive layer for observation, learning, and action. Since Robot Operating System 2 and security are new considerations for robotics systems as they move into mainstream, many questions emerge. For example, can some portions be secure and other portions be non-secure? Does everything need to be secure? What are the trade-offs between, security, performance, latency and throughput? What about real-time robotic systems? This article provides an overview of the Robot Operating System 2 paradigm and represents a first step toward answering these questions.

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AgROS: A Robot Operating System Based Emulation Tool for Agricultural Robotics

Agronomy ◽

10.3390/agronomy9070403 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (7) ◽

pp. 403 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Naoum Tsolakis ◽

Dimitrios Bechtsis ◽

Dionysis Bochtis

Keyword(s):

Operating System ◽

Real World ◽

Robotic Systems ◽

Ground Vehicles ◽

Robot Operating System ◽

Digital Twins ◽

Robot Systems ◽

Actual Field ◽

And Performance ◽

World Environment

This research aims to develop a farm management emulation tool that enables agrifood producers to effectively introduce advanced digital technologies, like intelligent and autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), in real-world field operations. To that end, we first provide a critical taxonomy of studies investigating agricultural robotic systems with regard to: (i) the analysis approach, i.e., simulation, emulation, real-world implementation; (ii) farming operations; and (iii) the farming type. Our analysis demonstrates that simulation and emulation modelling have been extensively applied to study advanced agricultural machinery while the majority of the extant research efforts focuses on harvesting/picking/mowing and fertilizing/spraying activities; most studies consider a generic agricultural layout. Thereafter, we developed AgROS, an emulation tool based on the Robot Operating System, which could be used for assessing the efficiency of real-world robot systems in customized fields. The AgROS allows farmers to select their actual field from a map layout, import the landscape of the field, add characteristics of the actual agricultural layout (e.g., trees, static objects), select an agricultural robot from a predefined list of commercial systems, import the selected UGV into the emulation environment, and test the robot’s performance in a quasi-real-world environment. AgROS supports farmers in the ex-ante analysis and performance evaluation of robotized precision farming operations while lays the foundations for realizing “digital twins” in agriculture.

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F1_Tenth_Course_Report_Group_C

10.31224/osf.io/68bvh ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Yi Chen ◽

Sagar Manglani ◽

Roberto Merco ◽

Drew Bolduc

Keyword(s):

Operating System ◽

Autonomous Driving ◽

Software Tools ◽

Simulation Environment ◽

Robot Operating System ◽

Available Information

In this paper, we discuss several of major robot/vehicle platforms available and demonstrate the implementation of autonomous techniques on one such platform, the F1/10. Robot Operating System was chosen for its existing collection of software tools, libraries, and simulation environment. We build on the available information for the F1/10 vehicle and illustrate key tools that will help achieve properly functioning hardware. We provide methods to build algorithms and give examples of deploying these algorithms to complete autonomous driving tasks and build 2D maps using SLAM. Finally, we discuss the results of our findings and how they can be improved.

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A Robot Operating System Framework for Secure UAV Communications

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21041369 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (4) ◽

pp. 1369

Author(s):

Hyojun Lee ◽

Jiyoung Yoon ◽

Min-Seong Jang ◽

Kyung-Joon Park

Keyword(s):

Operating System ◽

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ◽

Ground Control ◽

Unmanned Aerial System ◽

Security Framework ◽

Security Vulnerabilities ◽

Robot Operating System ◽

Security Issues ◽

Aerial Vehicles ◽

Ground Control Station

To perform advanced operations with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it is crucial that components other than the existing ones such as flight controller, network devices, and ground control station (GCS) are also used. The inevitable addition of hardware and software to accomplish UAV operations may lead to security vulnerabilities through various vectors. Hence, we propose a security framework in this study to improve the security of an unmanned aerial system (UAS). The proposed framework operates in the robot operating system (ROS) and is designed to focus on several perspectives, such as overhead arising from additional security elements and security issues essential for flight missions. The UAS is operated in a nonnative and native ROS environment. The performance of the proposed framework in both environments is verified through experiments.

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Radiation Risks in Cis-Lunar Space for a Solar Particle Event Similar to the February 1956 Event

Aerospace ◽

10.3390/aerospace8040107 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (4) ◽

pp. 107

Author(s):

Fahad A. Zaman ◽

Lawrence W. Townsend

Keyword(s):

Effective Dose ◽

Energy Transport ◽

Radiation Transport ◽

Organ Doses ◽

Solar Particle Events ◽

Solar Particle ◽

Transport Code ◽

On Line ◽

Critical Organ ◽

In Cis

Solar particle events (SPEs) can pose serious threats for future crewed missions to the Moon. Historically, there have been several extreme SPEs that could have been dangerous for astronauts, and thus analyzing their potential risk on humans is an important step towards space exploration. In this work, we study the effects of a well-known SPE that occurred on 23 February 1956 on a mission in cis-Lunar space. Estimates of the proton fluence spectra of the February 1956 event were obtained from three different parameterized models published within the past 12 years. The studied geometry consists of a female phantom in the center of spherical spacecraft shielded by aluminum area densities ranging from 0.4 to 40 g cm−2. The effective dose, along with lens, skin, blood forming organs, heart, and central nervous system doses, were tallied using the On Line Tool for the Assessment of Radiation In Space (OLTARIS), which utilizes the High Z and Energy TRansport code (HZETRN), a deterministic radiation transport code. Based on the parameterized models, the results herein show that thicknesses comparable to a spacesuit might not protect against severe health consequences from a February 1956 category event. They also show that a minimum aluminum shielding of around 20 g cm−2 is sufficient to keep the effective dose and critical organ doses below NASA’s permissible limits for such event. In addition, except for very thin shielding, the input models produced results that were within good agreement, where the doses obtained from the three proton fluence spectra tended to converge with slight differences as the shielding thickness increases.

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