Reuters skewers Japan for leading the world in manufacturing robots and for having rescue robots but not having nuclear disaster robots. This is a bit unfair as pretty much no country has robots (or at least barely plural) for nuclear disasters- denial and spending the necessary R&D money for this very, very hard type of robot is not unique to the Japanese, the US is in similar shape.
Thanks to team member Prof. Howie Choset for passing this along!
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http://crasar.org/2011/03/18/reuters-slams-japan-for-lack-of-nuclear-disaster-robots/
http://crasar.org/2011/03/18/reuters-slams-japan-for-lack-of-nuclear-disaster-robots/
hello, i have been wondering about the lack of robots in use at the nuclear plant in japan. before i get into my post, i’d like to say i’m sincere in my concern for the situation, and i’m genuine in my questions about how applicable year 2011 robots are to the situation in fukushima. i’m definitely not trying to attack or slam anybody. i’m sad about the situaion in japan, but at the same time, i’m extremely frustrated by what i see. it seems so obvious to me, a non-professional yet still robotics-knowledgeable observer, that robots could have been used sooner to help the situation.
i did my undergraduate degree in cognitive science at vassar college under ken livingston and chris welty (he actually appears to have been one of the main researchers for IBM’s watson system which played jeopardy on television) where i did some basic robotics work (even went up to MIT to chat with rodney brooks) but i never went into robotics professionally after i graduated, avoiding graduate school and instead going for the easy money and less demanding work in commercial web development, but i did stay in touch with robotics. i went to both DARPA grand challenge events to observe the CMU guys and their HUMMER. and unfortunately i saw them lose at the second event to sebastian thrun and the volkswagen. i didn’t go to the urban challenge in person but i watched most of it on the web. i followed CMU’s crusher robot for the US military, and i knew about the missions into chernobyl (and the astonishing discovery of fungus which seems to grow in the presence of gamma radiation). for the last couple years i’ve been following much of the stuff which boston robotics does, as well as seeing various research teams around the world greatly improve the dexterity and prestidigitation of robotic hands.
anyway i could use some technical discussion about why you folks concluded that no robot mission could possibly do anything in the japan nuclear reactor situation. that doesn’t seem right to me.
i know the first practical reason is, japan didn’t have many robots on-hand that had an application here. a few, according to what i read about your collegues, but not many. sure i get that. although, it seems like they could have had these kinds of robots, if they had been copying and improving the stuff which the CMU teams have been developing.
however, the US does, i think, have some robots, from various teams, which it could have sent there pretty quickly, which would have been usable and helpful. i know the US was waiting for japan to ask for help, and the US government was not going to simply load a dozen emergency/crisis experts and 50 tons of equipment and supplies onto planes and barge into the situation and take control. but, it seems like the US could have done this to some degree, in only 3 or 4 days, if it needed to.
i know it may make no sense to question the experts who have years of day to day experience in related situations. but i don’t get, for instance, how oshkosh’s terramax system could not easily have been employed in a fleet of trucks in this situation. maybe they quickly die if unshielded, but oshkosh says the autonomous robotic system can be adapted to any vehicle and the US already has fire trucks designed to handle nuclear situations. would a couple of autonomous oshkosh fire trucks really have been totally, utterly useless here? seems like when i watched them in operation at each DARPA event, they could drive for miles and miles on their own, go where programmed, avoid obstacles, and complete tasks. certainly it seemed like they could be in action for hours and hours at a time, with no need to move any human firefighters toward the radiation sources. they are not battery powered and run on a caterpillar diesel engine.
you mention the logistics of batteries for smaller robots you might want to use for sensing, detecting, measuring, and most importantly, observing stuff.
i must really not understand the situation then. if entire fleets of trucks and helicopters can move in and out of this area, with all the liquid fuel they require, and if japanese engineers can run lines 2 miles from the local power grid to each crippled reactor building, establishing alternating current back to them one by one, then how can the logistical situation be so dire that a team could not rotate the robots in and out of a temporary base 1 or 2 miles away for battery swapping? is the battery situation really such a limiting factor that it makes all battery powered operations impossible? the team could get neither the grid supplied alternating current, nor enough liquid fueled generator supplied electricity, to support a few small observer type robots?
even a few observer type robots would have helped so much. when the power went out at the plant, apparently the technicians were working in the dark, with flashlights? is it actually totally impossible to send a robot like the Rover robot used at 3 mile island, into the plant, with lights, to illuminate large important areas? a “floodlight on tracks” (or legs as the case may be) is out of the question?
more importantly, the amount of conflicting information and disinformation coming out of every source is ridiculous. i’ve never, ever seen this much contradictory news coming not only from every television news outfit, but from each government as well. ABC says something, NBC something else, CNN something else, fox something else, NHK something else, BBC something else. then the japanese government says one thing, the US government another, france says something else, the UK something else, australia something else, china something else, russia something else, and so forth.
it would really be totally impossible to run a few data gathering robots through the plant? get the radiation levels, temperature, the pressure, the water level in various locations? check for leaks and cracks in the pressure vessels and containment pools and end the preposterous amount of contradictory information coming out of each news source? couldn’t the robots stream back live updates from various damaged areas, the way the robots working on the deepwater horizon did?
i mean we spent about 3 full days with each new source telling us directly contradictory information about the water level in the containment pools. the US guy from the NRC said one pool was totally empty and dry, japan said something different, and this went on for days. it was ridiculous. they couldn’t send ONE robot in there to take a peek? in 2011 we’re still THAT robot-uncapable? instead we had to rely on flying US airforce drones over the area, and satellite images, neither of which really answered the questions.
also the robots become radioactive themselves after returning from the nuclear plant, sure, but this was already something whittaker was dealing with over 20 years ago i take it. maybe the methods for handling this are even better now. i’m not clear on how much of a slowdown and problem this is with each sortie or wave of robots going out, then coming back. even swapping batteries (if the team could even get fresh batteries) may now not even be a trivial task, let alone repairing the robots if they’re damaged. are robots sent into chernobyl simply scrapped afterwards? the radiation levels in the most intense spots there are higher than the radiation levels achieved at the peak of the fukushima radiation output, as far as i can tell. if they can go in chernobly, it seems like they could do at least one sortie, one wave, into fukushima, at least? send them in, get as much information as we can before they die, then let them sit there dead? like the robots NASA put on mars?
like you, i also had the idea that big robots could initially move into the area lugging sheets of lead (or whatever radioactive “halving” material is suitable) to establish shielding for other robots or even humans. or, if the team was not going to use terramax firetrucks, the big robots could simply lug in plumbing equipment and set up permanent water supply operations for cooling. robots with limbs, cranes, hands, tools. i look at the workhorse robot which CMU developed to do serious construction and demolition at 3 mile island, and i wonder why there is no year 2011 version of workhorse. certainly it could be greatly improved. but, nothing?
Germany and France have special Nuclear Emergency Teams including nuclear disaster robots. See Robotland report
http://robotland.blogspot.com/2011/03/nuclear-emergency-robots-from-europe.html
But in Germany (Kerntechnische Hilfsdienst GmbH) and the french (Groupe INTRA) have robots hardened against radiation. Maybe something the US and other Country with nuclear power plants should also think of.
BTW finally after IAEA asked their member states about aid they are loaded into a Antonov transport plain and underway to Japan.
Two month after the nuclear disaster Swedish Demolition Robots arrive at Fukushima Nuclear Plant.
http://robotland.blogspot.com/2011/05/swedish-demolition-robots-arrive-at.html