Title: Highly Miniaturized Robots for Inspection of Small Nuclear Piping

Abstract:

Bomb making in the 20^th century resulted in the creation of massive facilities to produce Uranium. As part of a multi-billion-dollar agenda, the measurement of radioactivity is required for the safe disposal of residual Uranium in piping. Manual techniques have proven too approximate, slow and inefficient for this need.

The compelling need is the development of the family of robots for service in the full range of sizes important in these facilities. We describe the development and technical details of a modular robot, NanoPiper, to operate inside the smallest, 3”, piping within these facilities. NanoPiper development has the challenge of constraint to miniaturized mobility, lower-capacity batteries, lower-performant computing, less accurate sensors and a smaller radiation detector.

NanoPiper autonomously builds a robust and accurate radioactive model using newly-invented acoustic localization, state-of-the-art geometric profiling and miniaturized radiation sensing. Its autonomous robotic in-pipe functionality delivers the precision, repeatability, and certainty unachievable by traditional manual methods.

Committee:

William “Red” Whittaker (Advisor)

John M. Dolan

Joseph Bartels