Solving Disaster-response Tasks at a Nuclear Power Plant under Realistic Conditions

Environmental disasters usually trigger devastating damage and, in the worst case, can also cause reactor accidents in nuclear power plants, see Fukushima disaster or other detailed analysis and reports of accident's causes 1. The correct assessment of natural disasters and the resulting combination with radiological and nuclear accidents, is a major challenge for rescue teams. The conditions under which rescue and recovery operations, as well as exploration and transport tasks, take place are often challenging for emergency responders and involve a certain potential for danger. Serious incidents in the last decades have shown that rescue teams have an urgent need of robotic platforms for fast exploration and scene understanding, especially in scenarios involving radiation. This paper describes the rescue robotic systems used in a test scenario of a nuclear power plant in which the robots must handle sources with real radiation and lessons learned from various application-specific tasks at the EnRicH competition.