The Pond Cleaning System

The ability to accurately control the position of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) inside a nuclear storage pond has many potential applications such as monitoring, sensing and removing contaminants from the pond's wall, tasks that because of elevated radiation dose rates are often dangerous or prohibitive for humans. Unfortunately, there is still no general method that allow ASVs to traverse the pond within a few centimetre stand-off distance of the wall and maintaining its course while cleaning or collecting radiological data. The majority of the literature in this field describes localisation, mapping and control techniques relevant to open-water environments and doesn't consider operations near the boundary, where disturbances and reaction forces are significant, translating in to poor control of the vehicle. The few centimetres stand-off distance is required due to detection of alpha particles for instance, of which detection can happen only at very short distances or due to cleaning equipment that needs to maintain that distance in order to effectively clean the wall.