Modular Robots for Enabling Operations in Unstructured Extreme Environments
Operations in extreme and hostile environments such as offshore oil and gas, nuclear decommissioning, nuclear facilities maintenance, deep mining, space exploration, and subsea applications require the execution of sophisticated tasks. In nuclear environments, robotic systems have advanced significantly over the past years but still suffer from task failures caused by informational and physical uncertainty of the highly unstructured nature of the environment and exasperated by the time constraints imposed by high radiation levels. We present a survey of current robotic systems that can operate in such extreme environments and offer a novel approach to solving addressing the challenges they impose, encapsulated by the mission statement of providing structure in unstructured environments and exemplified by our new self-assembling modular robotic system, the Connect-R.