Category: News Page
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2024: a record year for the CHARM radiation test facility
After 9 months of intense activity, the 2024 T8 proton beam run came to an end on November 13, passing the relay for the last two weeks of operations to lead ions and related test activities. Consequently, the CHARM and IRRAD facilities also concluded their proton testing activities on the same day, after a record-breaking
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CRANEBot & Quadruped Robot Team up for North Area Intervention
When operators detected an anomaly on the functionality of an XTAX in the North Area, a robotic visual inspection was requested, however, currently access is impossible with wheeled robots in this area, so CRANEBot and a quadruped robot teamed up to help each other inspect the area. CRANEBot (left) being attached to the North Area
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CEM Robot in Test Operation at DESY
The CEM robot named MIRA (Measurement and Inspection Robot for Accelerators) successfully demonstrates its teleoperation and autopilot capabilities in PETRA III tunnel at DESY, Hamburg. The recent CEM robotic test campaign at DESY in Hamburg conducted from July 1 to 3, 2024, marked a significant advancement by demonstrating the successful operation of the MIRA robot
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CHARM radiation test facility is back in full swing
The injector complex restarted operations for 2024 this March, with first beams available to East Area on the 18th. CHARM facility and its team were eagerly waiting for that: first days of beams in T8 line have been exploited to understand the effect of specific beam steering operations on the mixed field generated by CHARM
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A Short History Behind The Next Front-End Computer Operating System
Front-End Computers (FEC) are embedded systems whose main goal is the low-level control and acquisition of data from accelerator's hardware. As the Operating System (OS) of choice, we use Linux distributions on top of which we add dedicated software. We migrated from LynxOS (https://www.lynx.com/) to Linux distributions around the year 2010, and since then we
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LEAPS Workshop at CERN – Androids for Remote Maintenance
12 June, 2023 16 organisations representing 19 light sources facilities across Europe collaborate together under the League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources (LEAPS) initiative and met at CERN for a workshop on remote robotic handling on 23-24 May 2023. Figure 1: Workshop participants from CERN and the LEAPS consortium Why LEAPS and CERN? During the
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MARCHESE project preliminary clinical trials
A promising step to the future of healthcare The clock is ticking in emergency situations, and every second counts, particularly at CERN. Depending on the access point and the distance to be covered inside for example the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel, the CERN Fire Brigade takes several minutes to search for people in dire
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LHC Crystal Collimator Alignment optimized with 1D-Convolutional Neural Network
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is set to improve its cleaning efficiency with the use of the innovative technique known as crystal collimation. This technique utilizes bent crystals to deflect halo particles into dedicated collimator absorbers, which helps to increase the betatron cleaning efficiency with high-intensity ion beams. To achieve optimal channeling conditions, the crystals
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Education Outreach Events for Robotics in 2022
Robotics is increasingly becoming a fascinating tool to increase interest in STEM for high school students, and the public. In 2022, we were involved in multiple outreach projects, and as well of course part of the student shadowing and hosting programme CERN is involved with. Initiative for Girls in STEM: Italian High School Students control
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Introducing release 3.0 of EDGE, the automatic Linux device driver generator
Front End Computers (FECs) are at the heart of the accelerator control system. They are typically embedded in a crate and connected over a backplane with dedicated add-in modules to accelerator equipment. The standard way to access these modules from the FEC is through a so-called Linux device driver. Drivers are typically resident in memory