Next-generation Nuclear technology will incorporate significant technical advantages, with potential gains in efficiency and safety. For practical deployment of these technologies it is important to optimized nuclear power plants costs across their entire lifecycle. The Boston Atomics MIGHTR project is one potential solution that improves reactor costs, especially for portable power plants, by ensuring the facilities use traditional construction methods rather than industry-specific approaches that are bespoke and expensive. One of the major oddities of traditional nuclear reactors is that they are tall — 60 meters (200 feet) or more — which makes them difficult to construct and maintain and nearly impossible to make portable.
The vertical design is a relic of traditional refueling methods where control and fuel rods are lowered into a deep reactor chamber. Deft Dynamics had an opportunity to work on a new concept for horizontal nuclear refueling in partnership with Robb Stewart and his team at Boston Atomics as well as Southern Research Engineering. The focus of the project was to evaluate how a robotic system could safely and reliably refuel a horizontal reactor autonomously, using visual feedback to carefully place and remove fuel blocks in the tightly confined reactor. Similar to our ARPA-E reactor repair project, the visual feedback system uses traditional computer vision concepts (fiducial markings) for feature detection, and pixel-to-pose machine learning feedback control for robust control in the presence of uncertainty and obscured visibility. We built a full-size replica reactor fueling chamber using MDF and controlled a FANUC arm from a single grayscale, radiation-hardened camera.
