Today, a growing army of robots is at our disposal with the pledge to help with everything we can think about. Some of these solutions can be purely for show, some can make a real difference in the way we work and keep humans out of harm’s way. They come in all sizes and shapes and, although we have yet to see a robotic bartender at the local nuclear site canteen, it can easily be agreed that, in the nuclear sector, characterisation/inspection of facilities can be identified as a prime area with real benefits and a high potential for an easy integration of these innovative tools for day-to-day usage: operators can avoid unnecessary radiation exposure, generating more and better data to inform risk assessments and decision-making processes.

Within that segment, numerous companies are nowadays demonstrating tantalising capabilities. New solutions have been introduced and are slowly but surely revolutionising the way we traditionally ran inspections. That said, there is a raft of challenging scenarios where access constraints and hazards do mean that most off-the-shelf solutions cannot address.

It is not often that a solution hits all the right notes and balances state-of-the-art, reliability and cost-effectiveness but we came across a real gem of a solution for these non-generic inspection challenges. So, here is a platform that has a footprint slightly larger than an A4 sheet, can run radiation surveys, deal with uneven terrain and even have a manipulator to take swabs.

Discover even more by reading on.