Mobile Robot for Exploration and Manipulation Inside a Nuclear Power Plant

Abstract

It is not easy to handle a nuclear accident in a nuclear power plant and keep the damage as little as possible. To alleviate the accident of Chernobyl, personnel were harmed. In case of Fukushima people were also sent into dangerous areas in the power plant. The first European Robotics Hackathon (EnRicH) in June 2017 was a robotics competition inside of a nuclear power plant in Austria, which was never put into operation. Creating a nuclear heat map within a two-dimensional map, a three-dimensional map and the manipulation of nuclear sources were the main tasks of the competition. A mobile robot called taurob tracker from the taurob GmbH was equipped with a SICK TIM551 laser scanner, a Kinect for XBoxOne, a nuclear sensor, cameras and a gripper. The 2D-mapping was accurate if enough features were recognized within an area of maximum 10 meters around the robot. With the Kinect a coloured point cloud was created. Successfully gripping a single nuclear source took about one minute. With the described robotic system, the given tasks of EnRicH 2017 have been successfully completed.