Abstract
There is a significant potential in the use of unmanned remote controlled vehicles in sampling and measuring radiological events. No attempts to standardise sampling and measurement methods using these types of vehicles have yet been made. Common standards would simplify the use of remote controlled vehicles in an emergency scenario and would thus be very valuable in critical infrastructure protection (CIP). The main advantage of using unmanned systems in radiological events is the protection of the human personnel involved. This report is about current state-of-the-art of unmanned systems that have potential to be used for radiation measurements and sampling. It is believed that search and rescue robotics is the domain that is closest to the robots applicable to the radiation measurement scenarios. Therefore, a definition for search and rescue robots and outlines of their major subsystems are given. This is followed by a review of deployment scenarios for search and rescue robots outlining case studies of major emergencies at which robots have been deployed — with an assessment of their value to the emergency services. Additionally, research and development in search and rescue robotics, including current projects, testing environments and search and rescue robotics competitions, is outlined. Furthermore, this report shows unmanned robots and concepts for sensor systems capable of radiation detection based on state-of-the-art radiation sampling using unmanned ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles with rotary wings or unmanned aerial vehicles with fixed wings.
