September 1997

Carnegie Mellon Is Part of a Consortium Building a Robot To Inspect the Damaged Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon~s Robotics Institute and the National Robotics Engineering Consortium are part of a U.S. team that is developing a robot to inspect and do structural assessment at the damaged Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine.

The U.S. consortium is led by the Department of Energy's (DOE) International Nuclear Safety program and includes RedZone Robotics, Inc. (a Carnegie Mellon spinoff), Westinghouse Electric Corp., Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and NASA~s Ames Research Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

A reactor at Chernobyl exploded in 1986, releasing radiation that killed 32 people and poisoned countless others, as well as the environment for miles around, in the world's worst nuclear accident. A concrete sarcophagus or shelter built around the reactor building is deteriorating and the Ukrainian government is under intense pressure to close the facility. It's estimated that cleanup efforts will take 30 years and cost some $750 million. To date, $300 million has been raised by Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S to identify and carry out a process to stabilize the facility.

Consortium members and Ukranian officials in charge of the Chernobyl cleanup gathered at the Robotics Engineering Consortium on September 11 to discuss the project. The U.S. team plans to deliver a robot to Ukraine in the spring of 1998.

The robotic system under development is called "Pioneer." It's a small robot measuring only 3 ft. long (one meter) and 3.3 ft. high (1.2 meters) that crawls on tracks like a bulldozer. It's modeled on a design RedZone built that is currently cleaning up waste storage tanks for the DOE.

Pioneer will incorporate mapping technology NASA has developed for the Mars Pathfinder mission. Carnegie Mellon's scientific contribution will be vision and robotic techniques for drilling into concrete and other structural material to retrieve samples.

Pioneer will evaluate the Chernobyl shelter for stability, map the structure in 3-D, gather samples of materials and measure radiation levels within the facility.

At Carnegie Mellon, the project~s principal investigator is Fredkin Research Professor William L. "Red" Whittaker, who directs the Robotics Institute's Field Robotics Center (FRC). The project manager is FRC assistant director and senior project scientist Jim Osborn.

In the mid 1980s, Whittaker and Osborn were principals in the Carnegie Mellon team that designed and built several unmanned, teleoperated robotic work systems that helped to clean up a damaged nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pa. In that situation, the robots had to move through radiation-contaminated water in a containment building, take pictures, measure radioactivity. and take core samples from the building's walls to see how much radiation they had absorbed.

"This project is very much in the model of work we did on Three Mile Island," says Whittaker. But he envisions installing add on technology that would enable Pioneer to move debris, cut steel, weld and remove nuclear material.

"Pioneer is the first offering of Western robotic technology to assess the damaged site at Chernobyl," says Maynard Holliday, technical lead on the Pioneer project from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. "This is the best we have to offer--radiation hardened components and a 3-D vision system that will render visually realistic images, a tool that our Ukrainian colleagues have been hollering for."

"This is a dream project," adds Osborn. "The challenge is great; the technology is great, the partnership is great and the development team is an all-star cast."

Return to: SCS News Releases
SCS-Today
School of Computer Science homepage

This page maintained by copetas@cs.cmu.edu.