Robotics

To clean up underwater nuclear waste, a "smart" robot.

Although its name is a bit of a stretch, Autonomous Aquatic Inspection, and Intervention Robot, it is known as A2I2, and was designed specifically to clean up nuclear waste found in underwater waters.

The collaboration came about, in the UK, between Rovco including Forth Engineering, D-RisQ, the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Thales UK and the University of Manchester.

Although it is a single prototype and there is no date as to when it will reach the market, this robot has completed two successful trials at Forth's deep recovery facility, located in Cumbria, where they hold 1.2-million-liter tanks of water.

The live demonstration lasted two hours and showed that its sonar technology system detected obstacles, avoided collisions, located objects at the bottom of the pond, while transmitting images, in real time, which allows decisions to be made by researchers on the spot, from land.

"The whole challenge of this particular project was to get people out of dangerous environments," said Gary Cross, senior robotics engineer at Rovco, "One of the key things is to increase the distance between the operators and the environment they are working in. And the easiest way to do that is to make the vehicle remote, remotely controlled and remotely operated."

The main difficulty presented by the project was latency, a delay that can occur when the robot and the operator become distant, making it difficult to communicate in real time, and therefore to make immediate decisions, such as in the case of possible elements that could crash into each other and create a catastrophe.

If we add other technologies that could complement A2I2's achievements, such as the pioneering Hullguard system, a system that protects floating offshore installations from corrosion without the need for divers to perform maintenance and repairs. It was tested in the North Sea with successful results. The company has also developed launch and recovery, recharging and high bandwidth communications technologies for remotely operated vehicles, known as ROVs.

The aim of this partnership is to minimize risks in hazardous environments, as stated by Peter Routledge, Forth's program manager "Underwater robots are increasingly being used in commercial and scientific applications to make measurements and interact with subsea assets and the environment. The aim of the project is to develop autonomous underwater vehicles that can improve safety and reduce the challenges of operating in hazardous environments."

If you would like to learn more about the project, you can watch their presentation in the following video: https://youtu.be/WUUVqG2OBlQ

25 de Mayo, 2021