First vehicle to enter the basement of Three Mile Island after a meltdown in March 1979. This vehicle worked four years to survey and clean up the flooded basement beginning in 1984.

From Red Whittaker’s Page

The first machines that initiated “field robotics”: (1982) addressed a need to remotely inspect the aftermath of a nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. The Remote Reconnaissance Vehicle brought back the first footage from the flooded basement of the damaged reactor. The Remote Core Sampler returned samples of the walls and the Remote Work Vehicle was built to do a large number of tasks inside the basement. Pioneer (1998), a mobile mapping and reconnaissance machine for structural assessment was deployed at the damaged Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Tesselator (1992) was developed for automated inspection and waterproofing of the tiles on the Space Shuttle. Tugbot (2006) surveyed an 1800-acre site in Nevada for hazards and buried objects.