Towards Robotically Supported Decommissioning of Nuclear Sites
This work addresses the problem of automating hazardous nuclear waste management for safety and efficiency, but it is incremental as it overviews existing challenges without presenting new results.
This paper identifies key challenges in radiation detection, perception, and planning for robotics used in nuclear site decommissioning, focusing on autonomous monitoring and multi-modal characterization without prior environmental knowledge.
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.