A Suite of Robotic Solutions for Nuclear Waste Decommissioning

Abstract

Dealing safely with nuclear waste is an imperative for the nuclear industry. Increasingly, robots are being developed to carry out complex tasks such as perceiving, grasping, cutting, and manipulating waste. Radioactive material can be sorted, and either stored safely or disposed of appropriately, entirely through the actions of remotely controlled robots. Radiological characterisation is also critical during the decommissioning of nuclear facilities. It involves the detection and labelling of radiation levels, waste materials, and contaminants, as well as determining other related parameters (e.g., thermal and chemical), with the data visualised as 3D scene models. This paper overviews work by researchers at the QMUL Centre for Advanced Robotics (ARQ), a partner in the UK EPSRC National Centre for Nuclear Robotics (NCNR), a consortium working on the development of radiation-hardened robots fit to handle nuclear waste. Three areas of nuclear-related research are covered here: human–robot interfaces for remote operations, sensor delivery, and intelligent robotic manipulation.

Challenges for Future Robotic Sorters of Mixed Industrial Waste: A Survey

“…Using the articles collected in this manner, effective and efficient technologies that can be used for sorting mixed industrial waste were investigated in this study. From these investigations, domain-specific sorting approaches for underwater [40], [41], [42], [43], floating [44], [45], [46], space [47], [48], nuclear [49], [50], [51], [52], [53], [54], [55], and biomedical [56], [57] waste were excluded. Rather, Municipal and CNI [58] waste, along with ND, CND [36],…”

“…7 shows a heat-map superimposed on the world map with the json data of geographic information. 2 Recently, 15 developed countries: Australia [20], [30], Austria [58], [82], Canada [13], China [26], [31], [38], [91], [92], India [18], [29], Italy [61], Korea [28], Malaysia [65], Malta [93], Poland [83], Portugal [94], Russia [19], Slovenia [17], UK [55], and USA [49] have worked on this topic on a large scale.…”

Industry 5.0 or industry 4.0S? Introduction to industry 4.0 and a peek into the prospective industry 5.0 technologies

“…The significant applications of automation and robotics in Industry 4.0 includes performing complex and dangerous jobs [ 87 ], enabling uninterrupted production [ 88 ], improving productivity and reliability [ 89 ], extracting data [ 90 ], working in unpleasant environments [ 91 ], perform monotonous and difficult tasks [ 92 ], deliver higher efficiency [ 93 ], working for long hours [ 94 ], material handling [ 95 ], customer service [ 96 ], surveillance [ 97 ], manage assembly lines and fabrication [ 98 , 99 ] which all are supported by various digital technologies.…”

Soft robotics for infrastructure protection

“…The three applications reported in the previous sections are currently the most advanced in the context of soft robotics for infrastructure protection, based on the success of the proof of concepts reported by the authors. However, there are also perspectives about the advantage of adopting soft robotic technology in other aspects of critical infrastructures, such as autonomous operations in radioactive environments ( Vitanov et al, 2021 ) and even space exploration ( Zhang et al, 2022 ). Yirmibesoglu et al ( Yirmibeşoğlu et al, 2019 ) studied the impact of gamma radiation on the mechanical properties of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), the most common silicone rubber used for soft robotic fabrication.…”