Nuclear Environments Inspection with Micro Aerial Vehicles: Algorithms and Experiments
This work addresses the dangerous and tedious process of nuclear decommissioning by providing a fully autonomous inspection system for hazardous environments.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling a small quadrotor to autonomously inspect hazardous damaged nuclear sites by developing onboard algorithms for estimation, planning, control, and mapping, with experimental results showing successful navigation and mapping in a full-scale mock-up under varying illumination conditions.
In this work, we address the estimation, planning, control and mapping problems to allow a small quadrotor to autonomously inspect the interior of hazardous damaged nuclear sites. These algorithms run onboard on a computationally limited CPU. We investigate the effect of varying illumination on the system performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully autonomous system of this size and scale applied to inspect the interior of a full scale mock-up of a Primary Containment Vessel (PCV). The proposed solution opens up new ways to inspect nuclear reactors and to support nuclear decommissioning, which is well known to be a dangerous, long and tedious process. Experimental results with varying illumination conditions show the ability to navigate a full scale mock-up PCV pedestal and create a map of the environment, while concurrently avoiding obstacles.