Pledging that Quince's loss was not in vain, a development team will be sending a new robot along with a "helper robot" in a radiation-filled reactor building at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant later this month.
Pledging that Quince's loss was not in vain, a development team will be sending a new robot along with a "helper robot" in a radiation-filled reactor building at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant later this month.
Quince is a Japanese-made disaster rescue robot deployed for recovery assistance into the reactor plant, which failed to return on Oct. 20.
“Problems lead to technological development,” says Eiji Koyanagi, deputy director of the Chiba Institute of Technology's Future Robotics Technology Center. “We can’t take it as all bad.”
At the nuclear power plant, improved robot technology is needed to help with the reactor's decommissioning. The development team sees its second attempt to operate in the harsh, highly radioactive environment as a valuable opportunity to improve the technology.
Quince is an upgraded version of a robot that won the Robo Cup, a global tournament where robots compete by showing off their performance. Its ability to navigate difficult routes was its selling point, but on Oct. 20, when Quince returned from measuring radiation levels inside the No. 2 nuclear reactor building and filming the surrounding area, it suddenly shut down and all communication was lost.
Workers were forced to abandon the robot, as the radiation there, at tens of millisieverts per hour, is too high for them to approach and retrieve it.
“We weren’t able to find out enough about the site,” Koyanagi says.
The sturdy construction of the nuclear reactor building makes radio communication difficult, so hundreds of meters of cable were used to control Quince, although this impeded the robot’s movement.
The two new robots are equipped with radios so that if one shuts down, a rescue robot can approach and restart it by sending a radio signal so that they can both return safely.
More work in the harsh environment of the nuclear power plant is expected to take place to prepare for and carry out the reactor's decommissioning. In the case of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the United States in 1979, new robots were also developed and deployed to decommission the reactor.
Last month, while chatting with workers at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, Goshi Hosono, state minister in charge of overseeing the Fukushima nuclear accident, said, “I think that (using robots for the work) will require big ideas, like a Gundam project,” referring to the popular anime series that features giant robots.