Abstract
This paper explores the design and development of a folding robot required to survey and characterize nuclear facilities only accessible via 125 mm diameter entry ducts. The enclosed legacy facilities at old nuclear sites like Sellafield in the UK have limited access. The condition, radioactive characteristics and accessibility of the enclosed environments is unknown and for decommissioning to take place, these environments must be mapped and characterised. For a robot to carry out this task, one of the key requirements is the ability of the robot to traverse rough terrain and obstacles that could be found inside the facility. To accommodate this, while fitting through the entry duct, the chosen design utilizes morphing whegs (wheel-legs), for locomotion. These are shape-changing wheels that can open out into a set of legs that rotate around an axle, allowing greater traction, diameter, and object traversal ability than wheels alone. The design and morphology of a folding morphing-wheg robot for nuclear characterisation, as well as the manufacture and testing of a prototype is discussed in this paper. A preliminary evaluation of the robot has shown it is capable of climbing up a maximum step height of 150 mm, while having a wheel diameter of 100 mm and being able to fit through a 125 mm duct.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for the Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Autonomous Robotic Systems (grant no. EP/S021795/1).
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Murphy, D., Giuliani, M., Bremner, P. (2023). A Folding Morphing-Wheg Duct-Entry Robot for Nuclear Characterisation. In: Iida, F., Maiolino, P., Abdulali, A., Wang, M. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14136. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43360-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43360-3_6
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