Variable position mapping based assistance in teleoperation for nuclear cleanup

Radioactive tank waste remediation and decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) of contaminated Department of Energy (DOE) facilities, and other nuclear cleanup tasks require extensive remote handling technologies. The unstructured nature of these tasks and limitations of the current sensor and computer decision-making technologies prohibit the use of completely autonomous systems for remote manipulation. This paper presents a new methodology in which model-based computer assistance is incorporated into human controlled teleoperator systems. This approach implies a form of assistance function in which the human input is enhanced rather than superseded by the computer. A specific task of cutting a pipe with a saw is chosen as an example to demonstrate the implementation of the assistance functions in D&D size reduction tasks and the results are presented.