Radiation Robot Makes Troops Safer

Darkman, Walkin Dude wrote to mention a plucky little radiation-proof robot working to make life easier for folks in the military. From the article: "By this time an hour and a half had gone by, and the team was temporarily out of ideas. Phil had estimated that the robot could remain ambulatory in the radiation field for only 50 minutes, and in fact the robot's lower portion was no longer responding to commands. The RAP team, as a precaution against this very circumstance, working with White Sands personnel had tied a rope to M2 before sending it into the work area. The rope, attached to a RAP team winch 100 feet outside the structure, ensured the robot could be hauled out if radiation damaged its drive unit. But radiation shields now blocked a direct haul. M2 was hemmed in. Using a ten-foot-long pole and standing at the edge of the field (which fanned out like a flashlight beam, strongest at its center and weakest at its edges), team members hooked and then tugged at the rope hauling M2. The deflection of the rope's pull slid the robot around a moveable radiation shield without knocking it over. The RAP team's winch then pulled the robot directly out. "

Re:Could Someone Please Explain This?

[YuriGherkin]

Gamma rays and X-Rays are basically the same thing - ionizing electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation can induce currents in a piece of metal that is moved through its field and these unwanted currents can play havoc with the circuits inside a microchip, perhaps even overloading and burning them out. The gamma rays could also alter the bits in the memory chips so the software running the robot could crash.

Re:Could Someone Please Explain This?

[Scorillo47]

Ionizing radiations (usually beta/gamma radiation) can affect materials in various ways. For example, an energetic gamma-ray photon (around 0.3 MeV for the Cobalt-60 spectrum) would cause partial ionization of Si atoms in traditional semiconductors. Since the n/p difference is extremely small in a single transistor, you just need a few thousand ionizations in it to make it unusable.

P.S. http://www.nlectc.org/training/nij2005/Conca.pdf [nlectc.org] - some interesting material there.

Uhmm...

[NitsujTPU]

Did you read the article?

1) The robot is not radiation proof.
2) It was a pain in the ass.

The story is that they fixed a situation with a robot. The robot didn't make life easier, it was necessary because humans couldn't approach the radiation source, even in protective clothing. It took 4 days to do, and the success was mostly due to shrewd hackery on the part of the team operating the robot.

Question

[Comatose51]

"Unfortunately, heat from the radiation source melted the plastic"

So, how did they assemble this radiation source in the first place??? As an aside, radioactive cobalt bomb [wikipedia.org] is VERY nasty and close to a doomsday weapon.

Re:Uhmm...

[NitsujTPU]

It's gamma radiation, they discuss that the robot is perfectly safe to handle after the bit.

This was a GAMMA source, not a neutron source

[Ellis D. Tripp]

It is neutron flux that will activate non-radioactive materials, not gamma rays.

Re:Nuclear Power

[Anonymous Coward]

Bro, human contact with high level radiation is already reduced to an insane level. It's not like humans routinely play soccer with clumps of high level waste. There is a recipe called "time-distance-shielding" that has kept the average dose to a nuclear worker in the US less than 100 mrem/yr since 1980. To put this in context, the average dose to any person is 300 mrem/yr (200 mrem/yr due to radon gas). If you have an x-ray performed on you you get an additional 10-20 mrem. If you fly on an airplane you can get between 1-10 mrem.

You are just touting a solution to a non-existant problem. While these robots may be useful for a nuclear accident on the scale of Chernobyl, they have no real use for normal operations (and wouldn't be useful for an accident like TMI where with an uncomprimised containtment, you could just wait for the radiation levels to drop).

Re:I hate reading about stuff like this

[twiddlingbits]

I think you are making this up, or else were an ignorant troop. Humvees ARE amored, just not to the level of surviving an IED made of 155mm rounds. They were meant to protect from small arms fire. Uparmored ones are being produced are in in country, just not as much as we would like. Not much except an Abrams is going to survive some of those IEDs.

The unmanned recon planes (such as Predators) exist and are in use. They are painted to blend in almost perfectly with the sky, so you DON'T see them. They are not used too often as they cost a LOT of $$$ and we lose them ever so often (too often). Good recon can be had from other sources, HUMINT is often the best but is hard to get.

Gov't contractors are NOT corrupt. Try working for one. There are incredible hurdles you have to jump thru to make certain all is above-board. And guess what, that costs money! When you have a whole staff of people doing Ethics Training that gets expensive, and each year every employee has to be re-trained to meet some stupid DOD mandate. Like someone forgets thier ethics each year and has to relearn them. The guys/gals in DC approve all the contracts, so if you think you are getting overcharged talk to them. They negotiate the deals and contractors rarely get the price they ask, often they get a lot less.

Re:Could Someone Please Explain This?

[name773]

and beta radiation would interfere with the tubes, but that's not too hard to shield for.

Re:I hate reading about stuff like this

[Raul654]

About the unmanned planes - you're flat out wrong. A predator is built with mostly COTS parts, with a price-tag of $4.5 million [globalsecurity.org] - compared with the $300 million price tag of a manned fighter jet.

Re:And it runs FreeBSD!! Awesome!

[TubeSteak]

Dude, you must be new here.

There's nothing at all 'well disguised' about the lemonparty website.

Seriously, you must be new here. I'd forgive you if the given link was a redirect, but anyone who's been on /. since the good old days of GNAA and TrollKore knows about lemonparty, tubgirl, goatse and so on.

I highly recommend you read wikipedia's entry on shock sites so that you don't get fooled again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shock_sites [wikipedia.org]

Re:Could Someone Please Explain This?

[Scorillo47]

I don't know, franly, but I am not sure about using tubes because as someone else pointed out, beta radiation (and gamma rays too) would ionize the rarefied gas inside the tube, therefore affecting the flow of electrons (in fact this is one of the principles behind various designs of radiation detectors). But probably it might work in some conditions.

Another solution would be to use hardened semiconductors, with much bigger gates, etc. For example, in space you have cosmic rays (which, BTW are much more energetic than nuclear-generated gamma rays). NASA is using hardened electronic components which are able to withstand the random ionization generated by cosmic rays.

Re:What?

[Cunk]

It's not "just laying around" and the article says exactly what it's for.