Issue link: https://htpgraphics.uberflip.com/i/1214361
REUSABILITY AND ROBUSTNESS Lead: Joaquin Carrasco, The University of Manchester Radiation damages metallic (electronic) and organic (plastic and rubber) structures. Robotic platforms built for nuclear environments have to be designed with this in mind. Extensive shielding and using radiation tolerant materials can prohibitively increase costs or limit design. Designing to include fault detection and backups in case of failure can mitigate some of this trade-off. Extensive testing to understand when components will fail in high radiation environments is fundamental work to inform platform design and reliability estimates. KEY PROGRESS • Radiation tolerance testing of LIDARs, including electronic components. Bypassing voltage detectors can increase the radiation dose that LIDARs can withstand. • Radiation tolerance testing of cameras and image sensors. • Testing the radiation hard cerium bromide detector. Both the lower limits of detection, and upper failure limit, were tested. • Radiation hard cerium bromide detector was incorporated onto an aquatic platform and tested in a live nuclear reactor. • Development of aquatic platforms, improving payload, robustness and reliability whilst maintaining small size. • Improvements in underwater localisation systems, including: - Tracking location using a reference marker. - Integrating MALLARD, a robot boat, for collaborative localisation. - Combining data from COTS cameras to provide localisation and 3D reconstruction of underwater. environments. • Development of the snake robot to integrate grippers and Raman spectroscopy using CoreteX. • Using snake robot for glovebox inspection and chemical characterisation. 15