  ITER's working environment is characterized by extreme conditions, that deem
maintenance and inspection tasks to be carried out through remote handling. 3D
Node is a hardware/software module that extracts critical information from the
remote environment during fine alignment tasks using an eye-in-hand camera
system and updates the models behind the virtual reality-based remote handling
platform. In this work we develop a retro-reflective marker-based version of 3D
Node that estimates the pose of a planar target, the knuckle of the cassette
locking system, using the markers attached to its surface. We demonstrate a
pin-tool insertion task using these methods. Results show that our approach
works reliably with a single low-resolution camera and outperforms the
previously researched stereo depth estimation based approaches. We conclude
that retro-reflective marker-based tracking has the potential to be a key
enabler for remote handling operations in ITER.
