A review of the environmental survivability of telerobotic control sensor systems for use in nuclear waste tanks

This report was prepared by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Technology Development (OTD) Robotics Technology Development Program (RTDP). During the next few years field deployment of remotely operated systems in nuclear waste cleanup operations will increase dramatically as DOE strives to efficiently and safely remediate the many waste storage sites. Typically, the most fragile components in remote systems are the sensors that provide feedback to the operators or to computer control algorithms. The purpose of this review is to determine the availability of environmentally hardened sensors to support control of a manipulator or vehicle system in a waste tank environment. The emphasis of the report is on the environmental ruggedness of currently available sensors. For the purpose of this review a set of nominal requirements for survivability were adopted conditions in the single-shell tanks at Hanford. This report is designed to be a practical guide to the state of the art in commercially available environmentally tolerant sensors for use with robotic systems. It is neither intended to be an exhaustive review of the technical literature on potential measurement techniques nor a complete physical review of the functioning of particular sensor systems. This report is intended to be a living document. As additional, corrected, or updated information is received from sensor manufacturers, it will be incorporated into the report database. The physical report will then be periodically revised and released in updated format. The authors wish to apologize to any sources of environmentally hardened sensors that were omitted during this review and encourage submission of new or updated data