i-TIM: A Robotic System for Safety, Measurements, Inspection and Maintenance in Harsh Environments

Robotic systems for search and rescue, measurements, inspection and maintenance of harsh environments, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), are nowadays essential for machine availability and personnel safety, reducing human exposure to different hazards such as oxygen deficiency and radiation. The Intelligent Train Inspection Monorail (i-TIM) for the LHC is an advanced robotic system completely designed and developed at CERN. Running on the LHC tunnel's overhead monorail, i-TIM can perform different autonomous missions such as early intervention in case of fire, personnel search and rescue, radiation survey, civil infrastructure monitoring using photogrammetry and survey measurements of accelerator devices. I-TIM's missions criticality and its operation with human presence in the tunnel require a high level of safety, complete autonomy and recovery scenarios, in order to comply with possible communication losses with the surface. I-TIM is equipped with several modular mechatronic and intelligent systems, such as robotic arms for telemanipulation and a fire brigade wagon for search and rescue and early fire intervention in the LHC. In this paper, the i-TIM system is presented and its design, development, operation and key features are described. In addition, results of the several missions performed in the LHC by different i-TIM units are presented.