As some of you already know, we’ve participated in the Enrich – First European Robotics Hackathlon where our R17 robot had to measure radiation, map the building and collect some live radiation sources from the reactor room of the Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant.
We had a great time preparing for the three missions, while we had to solve issues ranging from wireless networking through concrete walls to installing new sensors and the Rubedo CVM computer vision module on the robot.
The following video shows one of our two runs with live cobalt-60 isotopes, beginning with the 40 meter lift, and contains both external views and some operator video content.
It was extremely inspiring, that we met with the ladies and gentlemen from both research and industry who built the most capable robots you could send in when the time has come. This was the most realistic incident situation one could imagine.
The organizers from Austrian Armed Forces, EVN, Fraunhofer FKIE and European Robotics made very serious efforts to handle the participants, the visitors and the isotopes very professionally every day, and made sure everyone is safe and can work efficiently through the whole event.
Greetings to other teams!