Semi-Autonomous Device for Visual Inspection of Vacuum Beamlines of Particle Accelerators

Due to the closed structure of ultra-high vacuum beamline systems, a visual inspection of the internal pipe is hardly feasible. For instance, when opening the accelerator vacuum system, an endoscope can be used to inspect the internals. However, this proves to be impractical in case of large, curved accelerator vacuum systems with complex geometries. It is more efficient to open the system only at one or two locations and to use a mobile semi-autonomous inspection device with optical imaging. A mobile robot is currently under development in our laboratory for the planned heavy ion synchrotron SIS100 at FAIR. A multitude of vacuum chamber types with different height levels as well as gaps must be traversed reliably by the robot. We present a modular wheel-based mobile robot prototype with joints between the modules which let the robot climb to different height levels by lifting the modules successively.