The Department of Energy last week issued two grants worth nearly $3 million for further research into deploying robots in hazardous nuclear cleanup operations.
The grants to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts Lowell were provided under a program solicitation for the National Science Foundation’s National Robotics Initiative, which aims to speed the pace at which robots are developed and deployed in the U.S. for cooperative operations with humans.
Carnegie Mellon will receive $1.37 million over three years to research the use of small flying and ground-based robots for exploring “post-disaster nuclear sites” – specifically for providing radiological, chemical, and thermal evaluations of areas that humans cannot safely reach, according to the DOE announcement.
The emphasis of the research will be on integrated sensing, modeling, and planning, and the work will involve specialists in motion planning, ground robots, miniscule flying systems, and nuclear robotics.
Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute has since 1979 been developing and applying robots for various uses, including in tunnel systems where they might have to operate autonomously without GPS or communication with human controllers, said professor William Whittaker, who is heading the DOE-funded project. To date, that has meant infrastructure such as mines and sewers, but it also applies to underground DOE nuclear waste storage sites.
The robots can carry cameras and sensors to help create maps and models of a hard-to-reach area or object, whether from the ground or in the air. “The fundamental technologies leading up to this would be the traditional sensing, thinking, and acting for robots that are generic to non-nuclear domains,” Whittaker said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “Another way of saying it is that traditional robots would not have the sensing, modeling or planning that would relate specifically to radiation.”
For DOE, the Robotics Institute will need to develop rolling and flying robots that can operate in particularly complex facilities, carry cameras and sensors built with the “multimodal” capability to map radiation and thermal signatures in nuclear materials storage areas, and do not have to be retrieved by a human if something goes wrong.
Whittaker used the specific example of a tunnel at the Hanford Site in Washington state that holds a number of contaminated railcars that were used to move irradiated fuel rods from reactors to processing canyons at the former plutonium production site. The material emits gamma radiation that over time could degrade the timber used to support the tunnel, he said. It’s not practical to send humans inside, but it is key to know what is happening within the tunnel.
“It’s important to monitor nuclear facilities over time to understand contents, radiation conditions, structural safety factors, aging effects and projected lifetimes,” Whittaker said.
The University of Massachusetts Lowell will receive $1.53 million over three years to assess the potential for using the hands of the NASA humanoid robot Valkyrie rather than actual human hands in cleanup or operation of glove boxes in nuclear facilities.
UMass Lowell Robotics Lab founder Holly Yanco and Northeastern University robotics specialist Taskin Padir will continue their ongoing work on operating Valkyrie in a remote location – the robot is ultimately intended to be sent to Mars – “for which nuclear cleanup is an excellent application,” Yanco said by telephone. “So we’re looking at doing nuclear decontamination and decommissioning.”
The researchers’ work will involve ensuring the 6-foot-tall, 300-pound robot can balance itself at a glove box, applying its hands and arms for insertion into the system, and configuring remote-control gloves and a virtual reality headset for human control of Valkyrie.
The headset would allow the user to see the operation via cameras on Valkyrie’s head. Virtual reality could actually allow users to “fade out” the robot’s arms, allowing them to see what is below in the glove box that might otherwise be blocked if they were using their own arms, Yanco said.
Glove boxes allow for work with sensitive materials that could pose a danger through human exposure. But their fixed nature means they are difficult to move or adjust, challenging operators of different heights and sizes, DOE notes. The gloves required for the work also reduce precision, and the devices can present a danger — as spectacularly demonstrated in 1976 when a vessel burst inside a glove box at the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant and exposed technician Harold McCluskey to high amounts of radiation.
“Humans are very capable. But even in the safest of environments there’s a potential for accidents,” Yanco said. “So even when everything is great and people go in, there’s always that small chance that something could happen.”
This is “basic research” that will not result in a robot ready for glove box operations in three years, Yanco said. But she hopes the grant will put the researchers much closer to that point, which Yanco said is conceivable within the decade.
Monica Regalbuto has made technology development for nuclear waste cleanup a top focus during her tenure as assistant energy secretary for environmental management, and has spent money accordingly. The DOE Office of Environmental Management earlier in September awarded more than $1 million in two grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas A&M Experiment Engineering Station for research under the National Science Foundation’s National Robotics Initiative.
