Challenges of telerobotics in a 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 slowly in real applications. One of the main causes is the lack of proven reliability of those innovations, which depends primarily on the reliability of the hardware and on the reliability of the teleoperated system in use. Therefore, this paper first briefly reviews the state of the art of the reliability of (instrumentation) hardware under ionizing radiation. Under intense irradiation, only the simplest sensors survive for a reasonable time. Therefore, 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 then discusses the problem of man-machine interfacing more in general, and identifies promising research topics for the future.