Abstract
Natural disasters, industrial catastrophes and terror acts pose potential risks to everyone’s live and prosperity. Properly assessing such situations, especially in combination with radiological and nuclear (RN) threats, is a significant challenge. Several incidents in the past decades have underlined the urgent need for robotic platforms in scenarios involving radiation. However, the technical challenges when dealing with RN scenarios are immense. Unfortunately, engineers and developers often have no realistic testing possibilities, especially with regard to radiation sources, and cannot properly develop their robots for the demands of a real RN disaster site. Additionally, there is also a limited interest of the scientific community in getting their systems to work in the presence of radiation. One possible means to draw the attention of the robotics community towards such special tasks is through trials and competitions. Additionally, competitions also provide real world scenarios for testing which otherwise are often missing, allow a comparison and evaluation of the performance of different robot systems, and foster the use of important technical standards. This work describes advantages of this competition-based approach in general, and describes in detail one event with RN tasks and scenarios, which addresses all the mentioned aspects: the newly established European Robotics Hackathon (EnRicH).
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Acknowledgement
The authors sincerely would like to thank the Austrian Armaments and Defense Technology Agency (ARWT) and especially its director Bgdr Mag. Michael Janisch for their tremendous support not only for the European Robotics Hackathon itself but also during the preparation of this work. Our thanks also go to Jan Paepen from the Joint Research Centre (JRC) Geel, Directorate G - Nuclear Safety and Security for his support with standardization in the RN domain.
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Schneider, F.E., Wildermuth, D. (2021). The European Robotics Hackathon (EnRicH). In: Lepuschitz, W., Merdan, M., Koppensteiner, G., Balogh, R., Obdržálek, D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1316. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67411-3_16
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