Yesterday, I wrote about work at the University of Bonn in Germany on a teleoperated robot called CENTAURO for use in irradiated environments such as nuclear reactors and nuclear waste sites. Today, I am going to write about another project to develop robots for use in the nuclear industry.
Up to the present, all the robots used in nuclear environments have been teleoperated by a human being in a remote location. While these robots are able to handle complex tasks in hostile environments, they would be too slow to deal with the huge amount of radioactive materials with unpredictable shapes, sizes and consistencies that are scattered around the world.
Professor Rustam Stolkin is a robotics expert at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. He coordinates the Robotic Manipulation For Nuclear Sort And Segregation (RoMaNs) project to develop robots capable of autonomous actions which can be used to sort radioactive waste according various levels of contamination.
Stolkin’s team is collaborating with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). CEA has developed a radiation-resistant robot arm that has a hand and fingers. This arm is controlled by a robotic glove or haptic exoskeleton which is worn by a human operator. Stolkin said, This now is a bit like a fancy joystick. So as you move your arm and your fingers, the slave arm in the radioactive zone moves its arm and its fingers.” The RoMaNs system incorporates the CEA robot arm. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) for its automatic vision system to allow the robot to detect, recognize and pick up many different kinds of objects.
The human operator and the robot share control of the robotic arm. As the operator moves the arm around and reaches to grasp an object, the robot can automatically control the orientation of the robotic hand to make it easier to grasp the object. The robot can also show the human operator what it is planning to do so it can be approved, cancelled or altered by the operator. The operator can simply place a cursor over an object and click on it to send the arm to pick up the object without further guidance.
The operator can feel the forces that the robotic hand encounters as it touches or grasps an object. This virtual sense of touch is very important to the operation of the robot in the irradiated environment. In order to control the arm in such a hostile environment, the researchers had to design mechanical systems that are more resistant to radiation than typical electronic circuitry that is usually found in robots.
The RoMaNs team has tested one of the CEA robotic arms along with their AI control system in a radioactive environment in 2017. The test was carried out within the U.K. nuclear safety and national security regulations at a site in northern England that is run by the National Nuclear Laboratory. This marked the first time that an AI controlled robot was tested in a real-world, radioactive environment.
Stolkin had previously said that it might take another decade of research and development before such robots could be deployed but now there are plans to deploy them at decommissioning sites in the near future. Stolkin said, “When we proposed this, the idea of AI-controlled robots, it was considered absurd by this industry.”