These inspection duties normally require human operators to control the robot remotely.
“This deployment demonstrates that autonomous robots can enhance safety and cut costs,“saidDr.
Robert Skilton from UKAEA’s hazardous environments team.
Demonstrating reliable autonomous inspections moves that process along.
The Oxford team didn’t have to build their platform from the ground up.
It’s also worth noting that deploying robot dogs at nuclear sites isn’t an entirely new phenomenon.
This past May, a Spot robot was used tohelpdecommission a nuclear power plant in northern Scotland.
It created detailed 3D mapping models to give engineers valuable dataset insights for planning the full decommissioning process.
However, UKAEA and ORI claim their deployment was a world-first since it was fully autonomous.
Image credit:Oxford Robotics Institute
