Speaker
Description
This paper depicts a deployable system with safety measures in place and mission achievable tasks for handling medical related radioactive sources. Radioactive sources are used around the world to support life-improving and lifesaving industries. However, disposition or consolidation of radioactive sources pose safety risks to operators, making a well-designed remote handling system desirable. Robots can fill this need and are often used in hostile, radioactive environments, either to inspect the restricted area or to destroy harmful objects. Precise communication is required between robots and controllers for safe operations. The collaborative robots (cobots) are used in conjunction with the lighting and vision systems to provide a robust operating platform.
The main challenges current mobile hot cells face are long deployment and assembly times, inferior design which results in unsafe working condition, and high costs of operation. This paper describes the application of cobots in the hazardous (radioactive) environment, and system requirements and challenges to incorporate safety while deploying cobots in a mobile hot cell. The overall design, transportation configuration, deployment features, required equipment, personnel, and device interfaces of an innovative mobile hot cell with remote handling capabilities are incorporated. Also, the best safety measures to handle unsafe/contaminated disused sources using our technology are portrayed. The better design structure of the mobile hot cell with back up cobot will result in significantly reduced time to deploy the mobile hot cell, even in unexpected situations. Using simple operating systems, like Raspberry PI and Arduino, with remotely and precisely controlling the lighting system and camera system, a cost-effective safe handling environment will be ensured. This new hot mobile cell design will provide handling infrastructure and the means of safely and securely conditioning sources for end-of-life management to facilities that have limited radioactive materials.
| Speaker's title | Mr |
|---|---|
| Affiliation | NNSA-ORS, Idaho National Laboratory |
| Do you wish to participate as a Young Professional? | No |
| Do you wish to be considered for a Young Professional grant? | No |
