Can Dancing Robots Help with Nuclear Clean Up?

Tokyo Electric Power is putting remote controlled machinery to use at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan. Helicopters mounted with cameras can safely survey the damaged reactors to give clean up crews a clear view of the mess without exposing them to dangerous radiation, following the 9.0 mega thrust earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

To prevent a worse nuclear disaster, power plant workers allowed several hydrogen explosions to release pressure building inside the disabled nuclear reactors. Now workers nearby are relying on remote-controlled bulldozers, dump trucks and other heavy equipment to drive the clean up process while radiation levels are still too high for humans to be in the area for any length of time.

Why Not Robots?

Japan is known for being on the leading technological edge, with its earthquake early warning system and automatic seismic shutoff system at nuclear power plants. It’s also known for mechanizing the manufacturing process by employing robots do the work of humans, much more efficiently.

So it stands to reason that the now crippled nation would want to send robots to the hobbled Fukushima Daiichi power plant. But there are no robots to handle that kind of a job — yet.

The father of industrial robotics says that it is impossible to anticipate a disaster like this which would make programming a robot for this clean up task equally as impossible. But, Joseph Engelberger also says that now that Japan understands what job a robot could do under these conditions, it should be fairly easy to develop a series of commands to allow the robot to react in specific ways under specific circumstances.

The remote-controlled power plant clean up operation uses humans to control machines, also known as teleoperation. Robots act based on code that creates parameters under which they can operate while teleoperators rely on human-driven decision-making.

So until the robots can be made radiation resistant and get to the Japanese power plant we’ll just have to appreciate their aesthetic value as baby robots dance.

French company Aldebaran Robotics makes Nao human-like robots. Nao in Chinese means brain. These five sychronized robots recently performed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

The company just opened its first U.S. subsidiary office in Boston this month.

Now, we just need to get them to Japan to sift through radiation-contaminated debris.