Vibration control of a flexible arm for the ITER maintenance using unknown visual features from inside the vessel

In this paper we present a vibration control scheme for a long-reach inspection arm in an environment as constrained as a fusion reactor. The ultra-high vacuum, the high operating temperature, the significant residual magnetic field and the nuclear activation in ITER will prevent from considering common on-the-shelf dynamics sensors. Therefore we propose to use the already developed rad-hardened viewing tool to feed an oscillation observer with visual information. In our approach the visual data are extracted from a totally unknown environment. Particular attention is paid to obtain a robust algorithm. Experimental results validate the proposed strategy.