Redesign of rescue mobile robot Quince

Abstract

On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami hit eastern Japan, particularly affecting the Tohoku area. Since then, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station has been facing a crisis. To respond to this crisis, we considered using our rescue robots for surveillance missions. Before delivering a robot to TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), we needed to solve some technical issues and add some functions to respond to this crisis. Therefore, we began a redesign project to equip the robot for disaster response missions. TEPCO gave us two specific missions. One was to explore the inside and outside of the reactor buildings to perform dose measurements. The other one was to sample contaminated water and install a water gauge in the basement of the reactor buildings. To succeed in the above two missions, we redesigned our mobile robot, Quince, and performed repeated operational test to improve it. Finally, one of the robots was delivered to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on June 20, 2011. In this paper, we will introduce the requirements for the above two missions and report how we fulfilled them.