SAN ANTONIO – A team at Southwest Research Institute is working on creating drones that can fly into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.
"Can you make a UAV (drone) small enough that will survive radiation, that would survive dripping water, that would survive the fog?" said SwRI senior research engineer Richard Garcia.
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The team is working with the University of Pennsylvania and Tokyo Electric Power, the agency that runs the nuclear plant.
"You can imagine going into the Fukushima reactor without having a person going in there and risk their lives," said SwRI manager of perception systems Douglas Brooks.
Members of the team said it gets one step closer every day to going inside the power plant, the site of one of the worst industrial accidents. In 2011, the plant suffered major damage from an earthquake and tsunami, which melted down three cores that led to radiation leaks. The plant was shut down after the nuclear disaster.
Garcia said the team has been creating obstacle courses to simulate a flight plan inside the power station.
"Being able to work in very confined spaces. Being able to handle varying amounts of radiation. Fukushima Daiichi has other additional things. There's fog, rain. So the vehicle will have to handle all of those parts of the environment," he said.
For more than 20 years, SwRI has been working with drones.
"What we are trying to do is take commercial, off-the-shelf software and make it better," Garcia said.
The team has big plans for the future.
"The UAV would take thousands of images and a person would have to go through individual images looking for damage or looking for something that may need to be replaced," Garcia said. "We would take that and try to advance that to the next level, where a computer is automatically finding all of those defects."
A big goal of the Fukushima Daiichi project is having drones go where people can't.
"Keeping people out of harm's way for doing things that people can't do safely," Garcia said.
SwRI officials said they are continuing to work on the project and what they learn will play an important role in future cleanup efforts at the damaged plant.