Development of an autonomous radiation mapping system

Abstract

Nuclear power plant accident is a growing problem in the area that has been affected by the natural disaster. The research outlines a number of methods which can be sued to control and vacuum the dust of the related disaster and measure the levels of radiation in the disaster area. This is believed to help enhance the response of the emergency systems. In particular, this work has developed a mobile robot platform with radiation detection capabilities that has been tested for radiation environment suitability. The importance of this work lies in building a radiation mapping system of indoor environment by using an efficient detection Geiger Muller sensor. In order to achieve this objective, the physical environments were equipped with stationary landmarks and Gamma ray that had been tested for simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm. Such testing has been conducted with the help of following such processes as perception, trajectory and localization with the use of Extended Kalman filter. Thus, building the Map is essential for this task to create a representation of the environment while the robot is moving in and measuring the levels of the radiation. The data related to the robot trajectory has been collected by the encoder measurement and incorporated into Kalman filter in order to obtain good result with less noise. The trajectory of the robot shows that, the starting point in this experiment is the same as the ending point which indicates the closing loop associated with the use of SLAM algorithm. The map proposed by this work is incremental and requires no prior exploration of the environment. The use of the Geiger sensor indicates that, the levels of radiation change with change of the radiation existence in the environments. If the levels of radiation are low the map would show high intensity of darkness. Correspondingly, if the levels of radiation are high the map would show high intensity of redness. Finally, the robot has traveled in square area of two dimension (x,y) 540m x 250 cm and successfully results have been obtained, thus, radiation map obtained is very satisfactory, as well the map of the radiation system can be determined even with the use of low quality components. The simultaneous localization and mapping approach has been proven to be efficacy and reliable.