Demonstration of the Robotic Gamma Locating and Isotopic Identification Device (original) (raw)
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IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 2018
N uclear facilities often require continuous mo nitoring to ensure there is no contamination of radioactive materials that might lead to safety or environmental issues. The current approach to radiological monitoring is to use human operators, which is both time consuming and cost in efficient. As with many repetitive, routine tasks, there are considerable opportunities for the process to be improved using autonomous robotic systems. This article describes the design and development of an autonomous, groundbased radiologicalmonitoring robot, Continuous Autonomous RadiationMonitoring Assistance (CARMA), and how, when it was deployed in an active area at the U.K. 's Sellafield nuclear site, it detected and located a fixed a source embedded into the floor. This deployment was the first time that a fully autonomous robot had ever been deployed at Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Europe. Expanding Efforts in an Increasingly Important Field Monitoring nuclear facilities and rapidly identifying any spread of radiological materials is of global concern.
A Prototype of a Robotic Research Facility for Nuclear Applications
Projectus, 2017
This work presents the development of the prototype of a robotic nuclear monitoring facility aimed to support technological and scientific research. It is a terrestrial robot in which nuclear and conventional instrumentation are available and easy-to-use through a user-friendly library for Python programming. The facility may be teleoperated (by mobile devices, notebook or desktop) or operate in autonomous mode, in which a user-defined program run on robot CPU.
2011
The Stack Characterization System (SCS) is a collaborative project with the Robotics and Energetic Systems Group (RESG) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Applied Research Center (ARC) at Florida International University (FIU). The SCS is a robotic system that will be deployed into off-gas stacks located around the central campus at ORNL. The system will consists of surveying equipment capable of taking surface contamination samples, radiation readings, core samples and transmit live video to its operators. Trade studies were conducted on varying concrete materials to determine the best way of retrieving loose contamination from the surface. The studies were performed at the ARC facility by FIU students, where traditional cloth wipes were compared to adhesive material. The adhesive material was tested on the RESG’s smear sampler to record how much loose surface material could be retrieved. The FIU students completed a summer internship during which conceptual designs we...
Robotic Handling of Gamma-Ray Sources in Site Radiography of Steel Storage Tanks
Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction, 1996
There are many possible causes of the radiation exposure hazard in on-site gamma radiography. Through poor safety procedures, for example, operators are in danger of rapidly acquiring radiation dosage by proximity to the radioactive source. In such circumstances a dosage, which might otherwise be associated with one year of intensive radiography work, can be acquired in a few minutes. The way forward is to find the means for reducing the risk of exposure to as little as practically possible. By contrast, the concept of a 'safe dosage level' is unacceptable. Through an integrated approach, involving remote robot handling of the radiographic equipment, safety can be better managed and higher productivity achieved, A particular benefit of this approach is the extremely fast source projection and retraction time compared with best current methods.
Towards Robotically Supported Decommissioning of Nuclear Sites
ArXiv, 2017
This paper overviews certain radiation detection, perception, and planning challenges for nuclearized robotics that aim to support the waste management and decommissioning mission. To enable the autonomous monitoring, inspection and multi-modal characterization of nuclear sites, we discuss important problems relevant to the tasks of navigation in degraded visual environments, localizability-aware exploration and mapping without any prior knowledge of the environment, as well as robotic radiation detection. Future contributions will focus on each of the relevant problems, will aim to deliver a comprehensive multi-modal mapping result, and will emphasize on extensive field evaluation and system verification.
Design and Developments of Inspection Robots in Nuclear Environment: A Review
2012
In the current hi-tech world the application of robots has become the crucial role in industries. The exertions which were beyond the capacity of humans are now possible with robots. Particularly in the departments like inspections, Robots have become the essential substituent. In hazardous environments like nuclear waste management inspection robots associated with Non Destructive Testing (NDT) methods are really a necessitate one. In a view to meet such demands, this paper features the survey of available robotic inspection system which can accomplish the hazardous tasks. In nuclear industries the inspection works cannot be carried out by humans as there is a chance of nuclear exposure. To avoid such a miserable accident, the implement of robots in nuclear industries inspection is become mandatory. The main focus of this paper is to reveal the methodologies of design and development of different mechanisms and robot, their advantages and limitations.
Towards Advanced Robotic Manipulations for Nuclear Decommissioning
Robots Operating in Hazardous Environments, 2017
Despite enormous remote handling requirements, remarkably very few robots are being used by the nuclear industry. Most of the remote handling tasks are still performed manually, using conventional mechanical master-slave devices. The few robotic manipulators deployed are directly tele-operated in rudimentary ways, with almost no autonomy or even a pre-programmed motion. In addition, majority of these robots are under-sensored (i.e. with no proprioception), which prevents them to use for automatic tasks. In this context, primarily this chapter discusses the human operator performance in accomplishing heavy-duty remote handling tasks in hazardous environments such as nuclear decommissioning. Multiple factors are evaluated to analyse the human operators' performance and workload. Also, direct human tele-operation is compared against human-supervised semi-autonomous control exploiting computer vision. Secondarily, a vision-guided solution towards enabling advanced control and automating the undersensored robots is presented. Maintaining the coherence with real nuclear scenario, the experiments are conducted in the lab environment and results are discussed.
2015
There is a significant potential in the use of unmanned remote controlled vehicles in sampling and measuring radiological events. No attempts to standardise sampling and measurement methods using these types of vehicles have yet been made. Common standards would simplify the use of remote controlled vehicles in an emergency scenario and would thus be very valuable in critical infrastructure protection (CIP). The main advantage of using unmanned systems in radiological events is the protection of the human personnel involved. This report is about current state-of-the-art of unmanned systems that have potential to be used for radiation measurements and sampling. It is believed that search and rescue robotics is the domain that is closest to the robots applicable to the radiation measurement scenarios. Therefore, a definition for search and rescue robots and outlines of their major subsystems are given. This is followed by a review of deployment scenarios for search and rescue robots o...