The challenges of telerobotics in an nuclear environment

The introduction of advanced robotics into teleoperation in nuclear environments is very hard. Innovations such as sensor-based control, teleprogramming or virtual reality appear only very slow in real applications. One of the main causes is the lack of proven reliability of those innovations, which depends primarly on the reliability of the hardware and on the reliability of the teleoperatied system in use. Therefore, this paper first briefly reviews the state of the art of the reliability of (instrumentation) hardware under ionising radiation. Under intense irradiation, only the simplest sensors survive for a reasonable time. There fore, this paper describes a man-machine interface that assists a human operator in using these sensors reliably to build a geometric environment model. This paper discusses the problem of man-machine interfacing more in general, and identifies promising research topics for the future.