Towards Robotically Supported Decommissioning of Nuclear Sites

TL;DR

This paper reviews key challenges and future directions in robotics for nuclear site decommissioning, focusing on autonomous navigation, mapping, and radiation detection in complex environments.

Contribution

It provides an overview of current challenges and outlines future research directions for autonomous nuclear site decommissioning robotics.

Findings

Identifies critical problems in navigation and mapping in degraded environments.

Highlights the importance of multi-modal characterization and radiation detection.

Proposes future work on comprehensive mapping and system verification.

Abstract

This paper overviews certain radiation detection, perception, and planning challenges for nuclearized robotics that aim to support the waste management and decommissioning mission. To enable the autonomous monitoring, inspection and multi-modal characterization of nuclear sites, we discuss important problems relevant to the tasks of navigation in degraded visual environments, localizability-aware exploration and mapping without any prior knowledge of the environment, as well as robotic radiation detection. Future contributions will focus on each of the relevant problems, will aim to deliver a comprehensive multi-modal mapping result, and will emphasize on extensive field evaluation and system verification.