Societal impact:
Safe decommissioning of legacy nuclear sites is one of the major challenges faced by any society which has a history of engaging in nuclear activities. Improving our ability to automate such tasks, directly removes humans from performing hazardous work, but also accelerates the remediation of the overall societal hazard.
As well as using robots to help the nuclear industry, RoMaNS is also showing how nuclear applications can help the robotics community. EU robotics research expertise needs to find applications for advanced robotics which are: 1) needed in the near term; 2) economically large; 3) societally important; 4) can only be solved with robots. Nuclear clean-up offers an ideal opportunity to apply EU’s world-leading robotics and AI capabilities.
Academic impact:
The RoMaNS project has made significant advances beyond the state-of-the-art, in diverse fields of study, ranging from mechanical engineering, to novel computer algorithms, to adapting psychology and human-factors methodologies to investigate human-robot interaction.
The project generated 60 peer reviewed scientific publications. RoMaNS researchers have given over 50 invited talks. We have also organised and/or hosted a large number of workshops on robotic manipulation, and applications for robotics to hazardous environments at major international conferences such as ERF, ICRA and IROS. We have collaborated with other EU experts to create a new euRobotics Topic Group on roboticas for nuclear and other extreme environments.
Industrial and commercial impact:
1) RoMaNS project partner CEA developed a novel robot arm, and created a new spin-out company, Sybot, which will market the robot commercially.
2) CEA also developed a new haptic exoskeleton hand/glove, which is being transferred to CEA spinout company Haption for commercial exploitation.
3) CEA also developed a novel dexterous 3-finger slave hand, which may also be commercialised.
4) Robot vision and autonomous grasping work of UoB has been transferred to industry through UoB’s knowledge transfer partnership with KUKA-UK.
5) Vision-guided autonomous robotic grasping methods, are being adapted for a variety of applications in manufacturing industry.
6) Partners UoB and NNL have extended the vision-guided robot arm control methods, to control a robot arm to deploy a powerful laser cutter, for cutting and dismantling highly contaminated legacy nuclear waste objects.
7) Most importantly, the (highly conservative) nuclear industry has become convinced that advanced robotics, including autonomous robot control, can be introduced safely and effectively in the near-term.
Educational outreach and public communication of science:
RoMaNS has engaged with the public in a variety of ways, ranging from “Pint of Science” lectures (where a scientist gives a lecture to the public in a pub setting), to being interviewed on the BBC Radio4 “Today” program.
We have also engaged in a large amount of educational outreach work. PI Stolkin ran one week robotics summer schools in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 at the historic Royal Institution of Great Britain, where approx. 100 school children designed and built their own robots, motivated by the issues of cleaning up nuclear waste. We also worked with Royal Institution to run numerous robotics workshops with schools across the UK. We also collaborated with educational researchers in the US to create innovative curricula in which school children build and deploy their own environmental monitoring sensors.
