An Underwater Robotic Network for Monitoring Nuclear Waste Storage Pools

Sarfraz Nawaz; Muzammil Hussain; Simon Watson; Niki Trigoni; Peter Green

Sensor Systems and Software. First International ICST Conference, S-CUBE 2009, Pisa, Italy, September 7-9, 2009, Revised Selected Papers

Research Article

An Underwater Robotic Network for Monitoring Nuclear Waste Storage Pools

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@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-11528-8_17,
    author={Sarfraz Nawaz and Muzammil Hussain and Simon Watson and Niki Trigoni and Peter Green},
    title={An Underwater Robotic Network for Monitoring Nuclear Waste Storage Pools},
    proceedings={Sensor Systems and Software. First International ICST Conference, S-CUBE 2009, Pisa, Italy, September 7-9, 2009, Revised Selected Papers},
    proceedings_a={S-CUBE},
    year={2012},
    month={5},
    keywords={},
    doi={10.1007/978-3-642-11528-8_17}
}

Sarfraz Nawaz
Muzammil Hussain
Simon Watson
Niki Trigoni
Peter Green
Year: 2012
An Underwater Robotic Network for Monitoring Nuclear Waste Storage Pools
S-CUBE
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-11528-8_17

Sarfraz Nawaz¹^,*, Muzammil Hussain¹^,*, Simon Watson²^,*, Niki Trigoni¹^,*, Peter Green²^,*

1: Oxford University Computing Laboratory
2: University of Manchester

*Contact email: Sarfraz.Nawaz@comlab.ox.ac.uk, Muzammil.Hussain@comlab.ox.ac.uk, simon.watson@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk, Niki.Trigoni@comlab.ox.ac.uk, peter.n.green@manchester.ac.uk

Abstract

Nuclear power provides a significant portion of our current energy demand and is likely to become more wide spread with growing world population. However, the radioactive waste generated in these power plants must be stored for around 60 years in underwater storage pools before permanent disposal. These underwater storage environments must be carefully monitored and controlled to avoid an environmental catastrophe. In this paper, we present an underwater mobile sensor network that is being developed to monitor these waste storage pools. This sensing system will also be used in very old storage pools to build maps of their internal structure which can then be used for waste removal and pool decommissioning. In this paper, we outline the unique challenges of our application scenario which include robot localization in cluttered underwater environments and the effect of location errors on environment mapping. We also list other industrial applications that can benefit from our underwater sensor network.

Published: 2012-05-25

: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11528-8_17