Sensing and Sampling of Trace Contaminations by a Dexterous Hexrotor UAV at Nuclear Facilities - 18600
Safe and efficient cleanups are a priority for decontamination and decommissioning of nuclear facilities. The contaminations of byproducts and wastes in such nuclear facilities pose a serious problems while decommissioning, to both the operators and public. Sensing these contaminations and cleaning them is an essential part of the safety procedures. The contaminations might range from low-energy to high-energy byproducts. Sensing these byproducts would require contact based or non-contact based sensing, based on its energy levels. Byproducts such as americium, are low-energy which makes it difficult to sense and sample without contact. Therefore, the workers need to physically swab the surfaces to collect the samples of these contaminations. These tasks pose a great danger for the safety of the human workers which includes the risk to reach greater heights, exposure to the radiation and sampling the entire building. A robotic solution is much more desirable in these cases, where the worker can safely handle the contaminations from a safe area. Use of robotic technologies inside these hazardous environments ensures the safety and enhances the performance. The more suitable robotic solution for reaching great heights and covering large areas of nuclear facilities, are aerial vehicles. Multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are chosen for their ability to hover at a position and also fly around in confined spaces. Quadrotors are a common choice of multi-rotor UAVs both research and industry because of its ease to fly and commercial availability. For the applications during the cleanups we need the UAV to not only hover and fly in confined spaces, but also interact with the physical world. Despite of quadrotor's advantages, they are not a best suit as they can't interact with the physical world. The tasks involving physical interactions would require the UAV to apply arbitrary forces and torques in all six degrees of freedom (DOF). As quadrotors are under-actuated and non-holonomic in motion, they cannot exert all the required forces. At Collaborative Robotics Lab, Purdue University, we developed a novel multi-rotor UAV solution, Dexterous Hexrotor, which can exert arbitrary forces and torques in all six DOF, independently and instantaneously. This enables the UAV platform to quickly respond to the external disturbances and precisely hold its position during the mission. The Dexterous Hexrotor serves as a robotic tool for the workers to perform sensing and sampling during the cleanups. Workers can operate Dexterous Hexrotor manually and/or semi-autonomously with human intervention. Manual control requires the worker to fly the Dexterous Hexrotor using a remote control. So the workers should possess knowledge on flying the UAV and to perform physical interaction. A semiautonomous Dexterous Hexrotor requires human input to some extent and requires very less knowledge of flying. The autonomy is designed to operate in flight mode and sampling mode. In flight mode, Dexterous Hexrotor takes off from a 'safe' area, reaches the desired altitude, and fly autonomously towards a sampling point. This sampling point is the target position specified on the 2D reference map. This mode also includes navigation towards the sampling point, avoiding the obstacles in the constrained environment. After reaching a stopping point, Dexterous Hexrotor waits for the human input for a target location to swab and collect samples. The Dexterous Hexrotor is now in sampling mode and waits for the human input. The human operator selects the swabbing location through the live streaming video from onboard camera. Through visual servoing, aided by the map, the UAV will move closer towards the target position. It then transitions to the impact control scheme to perform physical interaction with the wall and collects samples. Once the sample is collected, it autonomously returns back to the takeoff position in 'safe' area for the analysis by mass spectrometry. In this paper, we majorly focus on the physical interaction strategy and the required components which enables the autonomy. Decommissioning of nuclear facilities requires decontamination inside the entire buildings. Decontamination of nuclear facilities involves sensing and sampling the huge buildings, long shafts, etc. Sampling the entire facility is not possible due to the limitation in Dexterous Hexrotor's flight time. But this can be achieved by using a swarm of Dexterous Hexrotors to cover larger areas. The onboard robotic arm can be designed based on the applications such as cleaning, applying sealants, etc. The modularity of the design allows us to switch components as per the requirements of the task. These kind of robotic solutions functioning as tools for the workers, aims to make the work environment safer and playful. (authors)