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Hungarian Company Wins IAEA Robotics Challenge

The challenge sought to find innovative ways to enhance in-field inspection activities that are the core of IAEA’s nuclear verification work.

An unmanned surface vehicle that was designed by a group of Hungarian engineers has won the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Robotics Challenge, which IAEA launched in 2017. The design was selected by the IAEA after a thorough evaluation of design and performance by its experts, the agency announced March 18.

The challenge sought to find innovative ways to enhance in-field inspection activities, which are the core of IAEA’s nuclear verification work. IAEA reported that some of the most common tasks undertaken by its nuclear safeguards inspectors involve making repetitive measurements in locations that can be difficult to access and/or have elevated radiation levels, so robotics has the potential to play a useful role in them.

The inspectors frequently use a small hand-held optical instrument called the Improved Cerenkov Viewing Device to confirm the presence of spent nuclear fuel stored underwater, where it is typically placed for cooling following its removal from the reactor core. The job of inspectors is to verify whether the amount of fuel stored matches the amount declared by national authorities and that none of it has been removed and potentially diverted from peaceful use. Currently, safeguards inspectors need to hold the device from a gantry suspended above a spent fuel pool and manually peer through a lens at the individual fuel assemblies, of which there can be hundreds at a time.

Through the challenge, IAEA sought designs that could mount the newly developed neXt Generation Cerenkov Viewing Device, which is capable of providing digital recording, inside a small, robotized floating platform that would autonomously propel itself across the surface of a spent fuel pool. By stabilizing the XCVD in a vertical position, the unmanned vehicle could provide clearer images faster, to aid nuclear safeguards inspectors in verifying the spent nuclear fuel.

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