Fig. 14-1 The concept of the human acts simulation program

It is necessary for the reduction of radiation damage to the human worker and labor-saving under circumstances with high dose rate, to develop technologies for intelligent and autonomous power plant and robot working in the plant instead of a human worker. In the Human Acts Simulation Program (HASP), in which the basic and underlying technologies of an intelligent robot for patrol and inspection in nuclear plants are being developed, a human-shaped robot reads and understands instructions written in natural language (Japanese), planning and producing a sequence of actions in a world model and it finally accomplishes the maintenance task for the nuclear plant, as shown in Fig. 14-1. In addition, the biped locomotion based on dynamics is visualized within the environment as a three-dimensional image. As for the elemental technologies of the HASP, in the development of logical simulation techniques, the following research is being performed; research for instruction understanding to quickly and automatically produce a sequence of robot actions by using the results from the analyses of the syntactic and semantic structure of the instructions, research for construction of the world model as the environment of robots and the visualization of the simulation results, and research for environment recognition to effect the patrol and inspection functions by a robot based on the sensor information. In the development of numerical simulation techniques, the following research is being performed; research for robot dynamics to develop the simulation and evaluation techniques for a biped locomotion robot and to establish the design criteria of a human-shaped robot, research for dose evaluation to develop a method of evaluating the radiation damage of the robot body, and development of the Monte Carlo machine for high performance processing of the logical/numerical simulation in the HASP.

Reference M. Akimoto et al., HASP: Human Acts Simulation Program, Proc. of ANS Fifth Topical Meeting on Robotics and Remote Handling, Knoxville, Tennessee (1993). K. Higuchi et al., Development of JAERI Monte Carlo Machine and its Effective Performance, Computer Assisted Mechanics and Engineering Sciences, Vol.1 (1994).

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