About the Robots for Hazardous Environments Group at Rice University

The research of the group centers around issues in fault tolerance for robots for both space and nuclear environments. Robots for use in these environments are subject to a hostile environment and are designed to operate for long periods of time without failure.

Reliability of these robot systems is critical. The Rice group is currently working on the following topics and techniques:

Fault Detection and Fault Tolerance
Failure Mode Analysis
Fault Tree Analysis

A major focus of the Group is the Environmental Restoration and Waste Management project funded by Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. Rice University is part of the Cross Cutting and Advanced Technology effort which is part of the University Research and Development program. Currently, fourteen research projects exist to address various topics to improves the reliability of robots for the clean-up of hazardous waste at DOE sites.

The following Success Trees (complements of Fault Trees) describe how the the results of the University Research projects can help to increase the overall reliability of these specialized robots.

Other DOE WWW Servers on Environmental Restoration

DOE CC&AT Program, DOE EM, ProTech, Hanford, Sandia, LANL, LLNL, ORNL,

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