Robots Working With Hazardous Materials

While many research and development activities take place at Sandia National Laboratories' Intelligent Systems and Robotics Center (ISRC), where the "rubber meets the road" is in the ISRC'S delivered systems. The ISRC has delivered several systems over the last few years that handle hazardous materials on a daily basis, and allow human workers to move to a safer, supervisory role than the "hands-on" operations that they used to perform. The ISRC at Sandia performs a large range of research and development activities, including development and delivery of one-of-a-kind robotic systems for use with hazardous materials. Our mission is to create systems for operations where people can't or don't want to perform the operations by hand, and the systems described in this article are several of our first-of-a-kind deliveries to achieve that mission.