Mobile robot with a self-positioning system

Yanagihara, Satoshi; Hatakeyama, Mutsuo; Ito, Hirokuni; Mori, Shunji*; Takagi, Akira*

Automatic measurement of building surface radioactivity must be a useful approach for decommissioning and maintenance activities in nuclear facilities. In particular, in the final step of decommissioning a nuclear power plant, it is essential to confirm that there is no effective radioactivity on building surfaces by measurement. However, experience showed that hands-on measurement using conventional detectors requires a great deal of labor-hours for all building surfaces in relatively large facilities. To realize the automatic measurement of building surface radioactivity, a mobile robot equipped with highly sensitive surface detectors has been developed; it can move automatically based on route plans to measure radioactivity on concrete floors and walls. In the development of this system, efforts were especially made to realize accurate robot motions by applying self-position identification system in consideration of the fact that the measurement should cover all the surfaces of planned areas with minimum overlap.