Development of a Debris Clearance Vehicle for Limited Access Environments

The need for nuclear decommissioning is increasing globally, as power stations and other nuclear facilities reach the end of their operational life. Currently a lot of decommissioning tasks are carried out by workers in protective air fed suits, this is slow, expensive and dangerous. The work that is described here aims to develop a flexible mobile manipulator platform, combining a Clearpath Husky and a Universal UR5, that can be used for exploration of contaminated environments, building maps to aid in task planning, but also be used for manipulation and to sort waste. The aim is to develop a system that can be used in real world tasks but also function as a research platform to allow continued research and development. As well as developing a hardware platform, a detailed simulation model is also being developed to allow testing of algorithms in simulation before being deployed on hardware. This article focuses on the planned work for developing the system, as well as discussing the progress so far on the simulation model.