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Robots Compete In Navigating Simulation Of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Plant
schwit1 writes: A new DARPA Robotics Challenge completed its final competition recently. 25 teams operated robots around a landscape designed to simulate the hazardous environment that aid workers found after the Fukushima Daiichi reactor in Japan melted down multiple times in 2011. Engineers tried to help, but disaster ensued, rendering a huge area around the plant uninhabitable after toxic steam was released into the skies. The radioactive leftovers are still emitting a million watts of heat. First prize is $2m, second prize is $1m, and third gets $500,000.
Send the most worthless and despicable members of society into deal with the problem.
Politicians, lawyers, CEOs, Priests, Psychiatrists, priests, and the like.
It went from 169 MW to 1 MW in 30 months. We are about 18 months past Dec 2013 so if the reduction is about the same we have approximately 10 kW of heat.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
after the Fukushima Daiichi reactor in Japan melted down multiple times
Umm...no. Fukushima Daiichi was a station that had multiple reactors (six). Reactor units 1-3 suffered individual meltdowns, and unit 4 suffered a fire due to cooling water loss in the storage pond. Units 5 and 6 were damaged but were already in cold shutdown when the tsunami occurred.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I'm sure they will figure something out after the Fukushima disaster.
Just take a look at this samurai robot
You know things like cleaning up nuclear power plants is the first thing we will use it for. No wonder robots rebel in science fiction movies.
It'd have been nice to know, I would have participated. http://www.robots-everywhere.c... We recently did Battlebots, too.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Gets their mutant Roomba blob returned, and a stern warning about future encounters with Godzirra.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
TL;DR
Those fall under lawyers, CEOs, or the like.
Any system is going to have to be pneumatic and fiber optic in nature. Electronics fail in high radiation environments.
Every robot we've sent in there breaks in minutes if not seconds.
If your motors are all pneumatic actuators like what you see with big dog, then they won't fail when subjected to that kind of radiation.
Your only issue will be getting information from the robot to your command station so you can see what is going on. And the solution there is to use fiber optics. The fiber optics will transmit light into the reactor from the robot and other fiber optics will put up the reflected light to be processed by the command station.
Possibly SOME electronics that are VERY simple will work in a high radiation environment. But nothing complicated has survived. The whole push to miniaturize stuff is counter productive when dealing with radiation.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
We don't need to gollump across the desert slinging a rifle Mad Max style. We don't need expressive faces. We don't need stair climber ballet dancers. We don't need batteries. We need not rely on radio controlled operation. We don't need autonomous operation. We just need to lean around corners, extend and hook onto things, retract to pull ourselves along and extend again to get a camera and radiation monitor on a swivel close enough to far corners to answer the most pressing questions. A tentacle with two to three stages, each stage consisting of three to six sections that uncurl and and curl back like flower petals controlled by a human operator practiced in this dynamic of movement. Because the apparatus unfolds to navigate yet is flexible in its collapsed form, when there is equipment failure or the mission is accomplished it need only be pulled back out by its umbilicus. By smart apelike hominids flexing their strong muscles. To replace components, refine the actuators or (if based on Nexus 5) harassing or whacking or replacing the flaky power button to keep it from constantly rebooting.
Perhaps the Fukushima prize will be taken by a couple of bicycle mechanics from Kitty Hawk, NC with a design that uses no electronics whatsoever, aside from the payload.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
By the time the submission got published here the competition was already over. A South Korean team won.
i hope they figure out a crack AI robot that can solve the fukunuke in 5 minutes so we can build more ...
so the rich and powerful decision makers cup cake can grow up getting richer and eat non-radiaoctive food too
Making waste into currency, the ONLY currency, would insure that it gets carried off and distributed. Greed would be limited by the toxicity.
Overly contaminated humans would fuel the robots.
Robot turds would be made into new Sony music players. Robots would take a swim off the California coast when they need a lube job,
Speaking of Santa Barbara, we're coming up on the anniversary of the 133 degree heat burst of June 19, 1859, 3 solar rotations before the Carrington storm.
It's the only way to be sure.
Absolutely, positively *NOT* true! If that WERE true, we wouldn't have satellites flying around in and through the Van Allen RADIATION Belts, surviving solar wind storms, and so on! What do you think the reactors rely on internally when they're operating? Radiation-hardened electronics feeding to non-hardened electronics on the outside, that's what.
At the very worst, you can always go back to vacuum tubes (that's "valves" in the Queen's English) which, by definition, are rad-hard.
I'm baffled as to why we've not as yet built a single robot that can do that and survive in one of these reactors. They've all broken.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"I'm baffled as to why we've not as yet built a single robot that can do that and survive in one of these reactors. They've all broken."
Let me know when you have a robot that can handle Hot (60C+) wet (steam and water) acidic (did I mention the water is borated?) environments with lots of sharp edges (broken stuff, jagged metal, etc) and uneven surfaces full of things which just _love_ to snag trailing cables.
Oh, and you're required to pick up what's essentially a powder (uranium and plutonium oxide for the most part) on the floor of the area you're investigating. (Meltdown refers to the zirconium fuel rods melting and the contents spilling out, not the bottom of the containment vessel being breached). That powder and other stuff will get into every sliding or rotating joint you can think of and grit it up.
Uranium and plutonium aren't particularly radioactive. What's cooking off all those wonderful gamma rays and high neutron flux is primarily Caesium - which is a reactive metal even when you don't have radioactive isotopes.
You really are better off leaving it alone for a few half lives and coming back in 35 years when it's safe to work on it.
bah: Zirconium fuel rod CLADDING. It's only a few 10ths of a millimeter thick at the best of times.
Vacuum tubes are more susceptible to radiation errors than solid state units. When you add additional ionization trails into the ions jumping from plate to plate the tube does not work as planned. You can test this yourself if you hold a decent gamma source up to the side of the photomultiplier tube in a scintillation detector. No, the sensing element in an alpha counter isn't effected by gama flux, but the gas in the photomultiplier sure is.
I high gamma flux caused degradation in semiconductors. Satellites are hardened and shielded for gamma. The Van Allen Belts are a belt of high speed charged particles and not straight gamma. The semiconductor degradation over time is one of the reasons satellites wear out.
When the circle bar W ranch hands (Westinghouse Nuclear Division if you prefer) wanted to automate eddy current testing of steam generators; one of the big problems was getting video cameras that would work in a 5-30 Rad/hr field. They tried all sorts of hardening but the end result was buying cheap CCD cameras, slapping in an easily decontaminated steel box, and just taking the hit of them burning out after a month of use.
I know one health physicist that tells of trying to get the first pictures of the Elephant's foot at Chernobyl (Huge stalagmite of melted fuel)... then ended up dragging a cheap CCD camera mounted on a RC car from Radio Shack after all the high dollar custom robots failed short of mission from the radiation. I don't think the car made it back out but low tech worked long enough.
NRRPT/RCT
Corporations are DIRTY and care for nothing but profit, so even reading the fineprint doesn't always work (if they even offer it): http://www.newser.com/story/18... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"A news report says Japan's tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant was so unprepared for the disaster that workers had to bring protective gear and instruction manuals from elsewhere and borrow equipment from a contractor. The report, released by operator Tokyo Electric Co, is based on interviews of workers and plant data. It portrays chaos in a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful battle to protect the Fukushima plant from meltdown, and shows that workers struggled with unfamiliar equipment." ap.org/ - "Scientists have found traces of radioactivity in fish off the California coast that migrated from the waters off of Japan, site of the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster of 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The researchers say the evidence is unequivocal. The young tuna were found to be contaminated with two radioactive forms of the element cesium from Fukushima." http://content.usatoday.com/co... - "Japanese whalers caught 2 animals along the northern coast that had traces of radiation from leaks at a damaged nuclear power plant, officials said. 2 of 17 minke whales caught off the Pacific coast of Hokkaido showed traces of radioactive cesium, both about 1/20th of the legal limit, fisheries officials said. They are the first whales thought to have been affected by radiation leaked from the Fukushima nuclear plant since it was hit by a 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami." nhjournal. com - http://www.newser.com/story/19... http://www.newser.com/story/20...
And the priests. We can't forget the priests. Oh, and don't forget the Priests. Did I mention the Priests???