Robotics for Long-Term Monitoring

While long-term monitoring and stewardship means many things to many people, DOE has defined it as: “The physical controls, institutions, information, and other mechanisms needed to ensure protection of people and the environment at sites where DOE has completed or plans to complete cleanup (e.g., landfill closures, remedial actions, and facility stabilization).” Across the United States, there are thousands of contaminated sites with multiple contaminants released from multiple sources where contaminants have transported and commingled. The U.S. government and U.S. industry are responsible for most of the contamination and are landowners of many of these contaminated properties. These sites must be surveyed periodically for various criteria including structural deterioration, water intrusion, integrity of storage containers, atmospheric conditions, and hazardous substance release. The surveys, however, are intrusive, time-consuming, and expensive and expose survey personnel to radioactive contamination. In long-term monitoring, there’s a need for an automated system that will gather and report data from sensors without costly human labor. In most cases, a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) unit is used to collect and report data from a remote location. A SCADA unit consists of an embedded computer with data acquisition capabilities. The unit can be configured with various sensors placed in different areas of the site to be monitored. A system of this type is static, i.e., the sensors, once placed, cannot be moved to other locations within the site. For those applications where the number of sampling locations would require too many sensors, or where exact location of future problems is unknown, a mobile sensing platform is an ideal solution. In many facilities that undergo regular inspections, the number of video cameras and air monitors required to eliminate the need for human inspections is very large and far too costly. HCET’s remote harsh-environment surveyor (RHES) is a robotic platform with SCADA capabilities equipped with a sonar-imaging scanner, a high-resolution color CCD camera, and various combinations of sensors. The RHES is controlled remotely via a PC. This paper will discuss the development and application of this system.