Humanoid robotic system for grasping and manipulation in decontamination tasks

The disposal of nuclear waste poses a long-standing problem, which has been conventionally handled by human workers. This includes carrying heavy objects, exposure to radiation, and decontamination in full-body protective suits. To improve the working conditions and safety of the workers, robot systems can contribute to tackling some of these problems. So far, most robots in use are manually teleoperated and lack autonomy. To this end, we propose a fully autonomous decontamination setup with the humanoid robot ARMAR-6 [T. Asfour, M. Wachter, L. Kaul, et al., "ARMAR-6: a high-performance humanoid for human-robot collaboration in real world scenarios," IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag., vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 108-121, 2019] that can manipulate unknown objects as a first important step of decontamination without the need for human intervention.