It'd be a difficult mission. To understand why, let's first take a quick look at the alarming situation at the Fukushima plant. One of the biggest problems is that the reactors and spent-fuel pools have lost -- and and may be continuing to lose -- cooling water. To make things worse, the earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent fires and explosions, may have damaged the reactor vessels, spent-fuel pools, and cooling and control systems, as well as the buildings that house them.So if you wanted to send in robots, the first challenge is getting around inside the buildings. "The problem of mobility includes not only rough terrain but also gaps and obstacles," says Satoshi Tadokoro, an IEEE Fellow and professor of robotics at Tohoku University, in Sendai. "The path might have obstacles that a human could remove but most robots can't."
Dennis Hong, a roboticist at Virginia Tech, says researchers are constantly developing new ways of traversing difficult terrain -- using wheels, legs, tracks, wheel-leg hybrids, and other approaches -- but still, "a site like these reactors, where debris is scattered with tangled steel beams and collapsed structures, is a very, very challenging environment."
But what about robots designed for difficult terrain, like search-and-rescue robots and those bomb disposal robots used in Iraq and Afghanistan?
There are many robots capable of negotiating rough terrain, steep inclines, and even stairs. Indeed, as we've reported earlier, Japan might use these robots in rescue and recovery operations. But there exist countless other obstacles -- as simple as a closed door, for example -- that could be hard for most mobile robots to overcome, says Henrik Christensen, a professor of robotics at Georgia Tech, in Atlanta.
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