# Nuclear Environments Inspection with Micro Aerial Vehicles: Algorithms and Experiments

## TL;DR

This paper presents a fully autonomous micro aerial vehicle system capable of inspecting hazardous nuclear environments, demonstrating effective navigation, mapping, and obstacle avoidance within a full-scale mock-up of a nuclear containment vessel.

## Contribution

It introduces novel algorithms for inspection, planning, control, and mapping that operate onboard a small quadrotor in challenging nuclear environments, a first of its kind.

## Key findings

- Successful navigation and mapping in a full-scale mock-up PCV
- Robust performance under varying illumination conditions
- Demonstrated obstacle avoidance in complex environments

## Abstract

In this work, we address the estimation, planning, control and mapping problems to allow a small quadrotor to autonomously inspect the interior of hazardous damaged nuclear sites. These algorithms run onboard on a computationally limited CPU. We investigate the effect of varying illumination on the system performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully autonomous system of this size and scale applied to inspect the interior of a full scale mock-up of a Primary Containment Vessel (PCV). The proposed solution opens up new ways to inspect nuclear reactors and to support nuclear decommissioning, which is well known to be a dangerous, long and tedious process. Experimental results with varying illumination conditions show the ability to navigate a full scale mock-up PCV pedestal and create a map of the environment, while concurrently avoiding obstacles.