ERF 2018 Workshop

Inspection and Maintenance of Nuclear Facilities

16.15-17.45, Thursday March 15th, Tampere, Finland

Objectives

This workshop is directly aimed at creating an important new aisbl Topic Group, bringing together industry end-users, robotics researchers, and investors. Nuclear applications are potentially the largest and most impactful near-term market for advanced robotics, including autonomy as well as sophisticated human-robot interaction. Need, work and investment in this area are very rapidly growing worldwide. Our previous ERF workshops (enthusiastically attended by 70+ people resulting in working papers) focused on nuclear decommissioning and clean-up. In contrast, this workshop focuses on inspection and maintenance, needed for: in-service nuclear reactors; new-build nuclear reactors; nuclear waste storage facilities. In-service monitoring and maintenance, and Plant Life Extension (PLEX) represent a potential robotics market of order €tens-of-billions. All kinds of robotics and AI are needed: wheeled, tracked and walking robots (nuclear plants have stairs); pipe-crawling/climbing robots (thousands of kilometres of pipework need to be explored and monitored); underwater robots (inspection of very large fuel storage ponds or e.g. flooded sections of the damaged Fukushima plants); flying robots (inspection of high-up places in large 3D environments or ventilation shafts of underground storage facilities); robotic grasping and manipulation; advanced vision, scene understanding and learning methods; significant autonomy (communication is difficult through thick concrete walls, and required tasks, e.g. repairing damaged or degraded infrastructure, may be too complex to tele-operate). The workshop will achieve a multi-national, industry-academia facilitated discussion, leading to a working paper and proposal for a new nuclear robotics Topic Group.

Workshop Agenda

The workshop will consist of: 1) very brief invited talks, from leading nuclear robotics experts and end-users, from a variety of countries, spanning industry, academia, national labs as well as robotics and AI venture capital investment experts; 2) an interactive facilitated panel discussion and a conclusion session. Participants will be encouraged to submit questions for the discussion prior to the workshop, to facilitate best structuring of the limited time, but time will also be provided for open Q&A. The discussion will be followed up by a roadmapping working paper to be published after the workshop, along with submission of a proposal to create a new Topic Group on nuclear robotics.

Speakers

Schedule

16.15 - 16.20 Welcome and introduction (Rustam Stolkin - U Birmingham)
16.20 - 16.27 Rustam Stolkin- UK National Centre for Nuclear Robotics and H2020 RoMaNS
16.27 - 16.34 Steve Shackleford - UK National Nuclear Lab
16.34 - 16.41 Ariane Remmert - Rolls Royce Future Technologies
16.41 - 16.48 Ladislav Vargovcik - Technical University in Kosice
16.48 - 16.55 Hajime Asama - U Tokyo
16.55 - 17.02 Jae Hee Kim - Korean Atomic Energy Agency
17.02 - 17.09 Simon Watson (U Manchester) - RNE Programme and RAIN Hub
17.09 - 17.16 Christophe Leroux - CEA
17.16 - 17.45 Group discussion - towards creating an euRobotics AISBL Working Group on nuclear.

Organizers

Rustam Stolkin (University of Birmingham)
Ladislav Vargovcik (Technical University in Kosice)
Yasemin Bekiroglu (Vicarious)
Gerhard Neumann (University of Lincoln)