SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
Monitoring the harsh environment within an operating accelerator is a notoriously challenging problem. High radiation, lack of space, poor network connectivity, or extreme temperatures are just some of the challenges that often make ad-hoc, fixed sensor networks the only viable option. In an attempt to increase the flexibility of deploying different types of sensors on an as-needed basis, we have built upon the existing body of work in the field and developed a robotic platform to be used as a mobile sensor platform. The robot is constructed with the objective of minimizing costs and development time, strongly leveraging the use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source software (ROS). Although designed to be remotely operated by a user, the robot control system incorporates sensors and algorithms for autonomous obstacle detection and avoidance. We have deployed the robot to a number of missions within the SLAC LCLS accelerator complex with the double objective of collecting data to assist accelerator operations and of gaining experience on how to improve the robustness and reliability of the platform. In this work we describe our deployment scenarios, challenges encountered, solutions implemented and future improvement plans.
