Autonomous Radiation Detection and Mapping

Autonomous radiation detection and mapping is a broadly useful technology for nuclear power, emergency response and wide area search. The nuclear power industry requires regular monitoring to ensure that work within the plant is well scoped and that a reasonable estimate of worker dose is available for planning purposes. Further, there are areas within a plant which are too hazardous for routine monitoring and would be excellent for applications of autonomous platforms. These kinds of efforts currently require personnel who need to be trained, are inherently prone to error, lack accuracy in repetition, and work in areas where dose is a major concern. The main goal of the Phase-I effort is to develop automated survey methods, with integration of a specific cost function, into a robot navigation package that considers the quality of measured radiological data and attempts to minimize the Minimum Detectable Activity for all voxels within the directed area. These tools will be developed on a platform intended for integration on a wide variety of robots. In Phase II, the navigation effort will be moved to a server-based platform such that multiple robots may be directed from one central server. Without tools such as those being proposed, the robots currently owned by power plants mostly sit idle; because, while they are cool and can help with survey work, practically using them requires more time and effort than plant operators have to really leverage the benefits. The market is currently lacking tools which are well placed for search, survey, and automated evaluation by robotics platforms in the nuclear space. The proposed detection platform with 3D imaging allows for a next-level use of radiological data for better analysis and work planning. Through the proposed development, an existing gap will be filled, and robots will gain enhanced capabilities that can be applied to radiological tasks in order to be a more useful resource for power plants and homeland security. The market is looking for this technology to be developed. Commercially, the result of Phase I and Phase II development would be a marketable set of automated tools to survey, monitor, and evaluate areas for contamination. The public would benefit from these tools through reduced radiation worker dose, improved work planning for plant operators and a reduction in labor needed for regular monitoring for homeland security applications. The emergency response capability also canĺt be overstated. The ability to release a group of robots to determine the extent and severity of a contamination event can reduce potential harm to personnel and provide accurate and actionable information for cleanup and response.