Towards a Semi-Autonomous Robot Platform for the Characterisation of Radiological Environments

During the last decades, the (partial) automation of tasks during the dismantling and decommissioning of potentially nuclear contaminated environments has become of emerging interest for e.g. homeland security, disaster response, continuous maintenance, and dismantling and decomissioning activities. Nowadays, the nuclear scene is mostly dominated by manual labour. Radiation protection officers have the task of characterising an environment, which is often unknown a priori, before any dismantling and decomissioning activity can take place. Besides the potential involved health risks, going from radiation disease to an increase in the risk of cancer, this important preliminary task is very time-consuming and prone to errors concerning the taken measurements, storage and post-processing of the recorded data. To minimise the disadvantages, this paper presents the design and development of a proof-of-concept semi-autonomous, ground-based mobile manipulator robot ARCHER (Autonomous Robot platform for CHaractERization) suited for radiological monitoring purposes. Besides the mechanical and electrical overview of the design of the mobile manipulator, this paper describes the software tools used to build and deploy the robot. In addition, this paper describes the results of several in-situ laboratory experiments where the mobile manipulator platform is asked to perform a radiological scanning task on a wall.