A Robotic System for CERN's Future Circular Collider

The European Center of Nuclear Research (CERN) has over the years significantly contributed to our current understanding of the universe. The completion of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, with the discovery of the Higgs boson, marks the latest milestone in CERN's research efforts. Yet, there are still phenomena, like dark matter, the prevalence of matter over antimatter or the neutrino mass, which cannot be described by the Standard Model. This suggests, that there must be more, physics which goes beyond the Standard Model and still has to be discovered. A good chance to unveil such behavior is thought to lie in particles with a mass above 14 TeV and thus unable to be created by the current machines at CERN. To unlock observations in these high energy ranges, a new particle accelerator with a center of mass energy of 100 TeV and a circumference of 100 km was suggested: the Future Circular Collider - FCC. One of the FCC study's research areas concerns the automation of maintenance, inspection and emergency handling along the 100 km long FCC tunnel. The automation of these tasks play a significant role for downtime, reliability and safety of the particle accelerator and decreases the radiation exposure of workers. These tasks require various adept mechanical interactions with its environment in an extremely large work space. The development of such a robotic system is the over arching topic of this thesis. First, an in-depth study was performed to identify and clearly define the requirements and restrictions on a robotic system operating in the FCC environment. This study then concludes with high level recommendations for the so called FCC Robot, aiming to provide a solid bases for subsequent developments even beyond this thesis. Based on the extracted requirements and restrictions, a novel design optimization algorithm has been developed to identify an optimal topology and geometry for the robotic system, which resulted in a 11 Degree of Freedom (DoF) manipulator. In order to control such a highly redundant mechanical structure in the C++ CERN Robotic Framework (CRF) a new motion controller module, containing the implementation of a novel inverse kinematics algorithm, was developed. Finally, a prototype of the FCC Robot has been designed, built and deployed in a mock-up of the LHC tunnel for proof of concept studies and comparative cost estimation. The thesis concludes with recommendations on future improvements, a four year work package definition for the development of the final robotic system including a cost estimation and a summary on established collaborations with universities and other external institutions.