A Robot Named Escher, VA Tech
Fun With Robots & Fuku Update
As reported this weekend, mechanical engineering/robotics students and developers participated in the DARPA Robotics Challenge held at the Fairplex in Pomona, California. The three prizes were captured this year by commercial teams, all of which completed the assigned tasks within 11 minutes of each other. Do check out photos of this year's finalists to see the state of the art.
The competition was inspired by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, where deadly conditions have prevented humans from being able to get close enough to do much of anything that needs doing to limit the ongoing releases of radioactive contamination from three total meltdowns and four containment-destroying explosions. Here are pictures and information about three of the robots that have so far been put to work at Fukushima.
From the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE], here is a fascinating look at the complex and dangerous work that has been done by robot operators at Fukushima Daiichi, from an operator who maintained a blog called The Fukushima Robot Diaries, until it was deleted. IEEE's Automation blog writer Erico Guizzo salvaged it and re-published portions...
Before the blog was removed, I used software to make a copy of it. IEEE Spectrum has decided to translate and publish portions of the posts because we consider the information to be in the public interest. The material offers important lessons about the Fukushima disaster - lessons that roboticists and others should heed if we want to be better prepared for tomorrow's calamities. TEPCO has also been criticized for not being transparent, and these posts provide more information for Japanese citizens to decide whether the company and their government are doing a proper job.
Interested readers may also enjoy
this coverage of the Pomona contest. As for me, I just had to love a robot named "Escher" (pictured above). Though he didn't win the competition, he did pretty well.
I'm in my 60s now and have pretty much been waiting all my aware lifetime for my own personal slave robot. Which was to go with my flying car, which we also never got. And while robots and remote control construction/deconstruction equipment at Daiichi have managed to take some useful pictures and move/remove quite a lot of rubble, they have not managed to locate any of the three melted reactor cores or in any way diminished the constant releases of radioactive contamination. Moreover, in my knowledge of the multinational nuclear industry and technical details of the Fukushima disaster, I have to take issue with assertions that nuclear owner/operators in situations of dire disaster would "rather" use a robot to turn valves or flip switches in grossly contaminated locations than to cause the eventual death of any one of their precious workers.
Robots are extremely expensive. Escher cost $2 million to build at Virginia Tech, and we can safely surmise that none of the finalists in the DARPA challenge cost significantly less than that. On the other hand, your basic day labor grunt - supplied to TEPCO by Japan's organized crime syndicate known as the Yakuza, costs very little. Worse, hundreds of these workers have flat disappeared over the past 4+ years since the meltdowns, and no one is keeping track of what becomes of them. If it were possible for a human to absorb the kind of doses the robots were exposed to over the course of hours, TEPCO would have no qualms about using them. Unfortunately, said human would die before the task was completed, so robots it must be. Plus, humans can't enter a containment by means of an 8" pipe, while those clever shape-shifting 'snake' robots can.
Still, it's nice to see that robots designed for doing things far more useful than simply dealing death and destruction in warfare are being developed. And we can be hopeful that one of these days a robot may actually stumble across the corium at Daiichi and TEPCO will finally learn from that what, exactly, needs to be done to stop the releases and isolate the facility. So far they've had precisely zero luck on that scale. Now the used filters from the sometimes functional ALPS water purification systems - extremely high level waste - are themselves presenting a threat of hydrogen explosions that will send all that filth airborne once again to recontaminate the region. The tanks of cesium/strontium filtered water populating just about every used to be empty space at the facility have been leaking badly for years. Corium contaminated groundwater is still flowing directly beneath all of the melted plants and into the Pacific Ocean to the tune of hundreds of tons per day. Hell, even Japan's new regulatory agency the NRA is getting disgusted by TEPCO's complete failure to plug the many leaks or even develop a strategy toward that end.
Truth is, as long as these nuclear rustbuckets are allowed to keep operating despite threats from weather-caused blackouts, CME grid-crashers, floods, earthquakes and goof-prone humans, we can be confident that more reactors will be melting down and blowing up in the future. It is extremely doubtful that any robot or fleet of robots will ever be capable of isolating such a disaster site and preventing the inevitable contamination leaks.
Perhaps someday DARPA and/or engineers in the robotics industry will get around to developing those personal slave robots we've been expecting for so many years! In the meantime, I've been wondering if Escher is versant in six million forms of communication like his imaginative role model C-3PO, as seen in Star Wars Episode 1 before he got his "skin."
Be sure to check out the robot that won the DARPA challenge, a humanoid construct from KAIST research university and Hubo Lab in Daejeon, South Korea. His name is DRC-HUBO. Video included.