Feasibility of optical sensing for robotics in highly radioactive environments

The application of robotics for repair, refurbishing or dismantling of nuclear installations implies eventually severe radiation resistance requirements on embarked components and subsystems. This is particularly critical when optical sensing is considered. Optoelectronic components and optical fibres are indeed quite sensitive to radiation, and without special design are rapidly out-of-operation in such an environment. This paper reports the results of a series of y irradiation experiments on such devices, and identify their behaviour under radiation. Test results show that carefully selected optical fibres can keep their radiation induced attenuation lower than 0.3 dB/m even up to a total dose of 10 MGy. Temperature annealing can even lower this attenuation down to 0.1 dB/m. On the other hand, commercially available light emitting diodes and photodiodes present attenuations figures up to 15 dB, even after a gamma irradiation as low as 250 kGy. However, properly chosen bias procedures are shown to greatly enhance this figure. The paper concludes by showing the feasibility of optical sensing for proximity measurement and data transmission for nuclear robots used under severe radiation conditions.