Robotic Deployment for Facility and Hazard Mapping

The dispatching of robots into mission critical environments is becoming more and more commonplace as hardware evolves to a level of ruggedness demanded in these scenarios. Researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) have been working to bridge the gap between current robotic hardware readiness and its lack of efficient system deployment and usability. In 2007 the INL successfully deployed commercial off the shelf (COTS) robots targeted to Military and Hazmat Team usage outfitted with an intelligence payload in a series of chemical, biological, radiologic, nuclear, explosive (CBRNE) detection exercises. This paper examines the primitive behaviors that comprise the intelligent navigation payload used in the exercises, and discusses the experiments and the results. It also discusses how these technologies can be applied to the nuclear safeguards mission for the verification of facility floor plans and the cataloguing of sensor built maps for historical comparisons and analysis of chemical and nuclear facility activity.