Lessons learned:Symbiotic autonomous robot ecosystem for nuclear environments

Nuclear facilities have a regulatory requirement to measure radiation levels within Post Operational Clean Out(POCO)around nuclear facilities each year,resulting in a trend towards robotic deployments to gain an improved understanding during nuclear decommissioning phases.The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority supports the view that human-in-the-loop(HITL)robotic deployments are a solution to improve procedures and reduce risks within radiation characterisation of nuclear sites.The authors present a novel implementation of a Cyber-Physical System(CPS)deployed in an analogue nuclear environment,comprised of a multi-robot(MR)team coordinated by a HITL operator through a digital twin interface.The development of the CPS created efficient partnerships across systems including robots,digital systems and human.This was presented as a multi-staged mission within an inspection scenario for the hetero-geneous Symbiotic Multi-Robot Fleet(SMuRF).Symbiotic interactions were achieved across the SMuRF where robots utilised automated collaborative governance to work together,where a single robot would face challenges in full characterisation of radiation.Key contributions include the demonstration of symbiotic autonomy and query-based learning of an autonomous mission supporting scalable autonomy and autonomy as a service.The coordination of the CPS was a success and displayed further challenges and improvements related to future MR fleets.