Objectives

A dual-arm robot has to sort radioactive waste autonomously. Some sorted items are soft (compressible), e.g. overalls, protective gloves, rubber boots. Machine vision and tactile feedback is needed here. Project activities have been guided by the end-user partner Ansaldo NES Ltd., which is a major British company involved in decontamination of past nuclear facilities worldwide. The experimental scenarios will concentrate to the waste taken out from Magnox swarf storage silos by a special robotic crane. The waste will be put on a tray and sorted there by a dual-arm robot (to be designed based on RadioRoSo experience).

RadioRoSo project has been designing/developing/testing methods and their implementation on a laboratory mock up consisting of dual-arm robotic manipulator inherited from CloPeMa project, which is available with two partners, i.e. CVUT in Prague and CERTH in Thessaloniki. These two devices have been enriched with new sensors, method and their software implementations and constitute RadioRoSo test bed. UniGe developed CloPeMa grippers dedicated to the garment unfolding/folding. These grippers will be used in RadioRoSo initial experiments. UniGe has been developing new grippers for radioactive waste sorting and will deliver them. SURO has been providing its expertise in nuclear domain and Ansaldo NES plays the role of end user. RadioRoSo will upgrade robotic capabilities currently at TRL 4 to TRL 6, which will likely make it attractive for end users like Ansaldo ENS.