Safe Development Environments for Radiation Tracing Robots
- Robots can substitute for men in radioactively-contaminated areas. This is a suitable field to deploy robots for measurements, repair, or clearance, but development and test of such robots could be dangerous, because radiation sources need to be handled. To avoid these hazards in development or public demonstrations, safe alternatives to radiation samples have been sought using an already existing robot
(EtaBot). One proposed solution is an optical substitution (“light follower”), the other one a fully-digital simulation of the contaminated area and the robot movement inside it using a hardware-in-the-loop simulator (HiL).