The latest crawler robot to be dispatched inside the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was armed with a standard-issue smartphone as its communication and image-taking device.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, designed the new crawler itself. Its body was created with a 3-D printer and is compact enough to move through a 13-centimeter wide space, the company said.
The crawler was sent Thursday to explore inside reactor No. 3, where nearly all the nuclear fuel was found to have melted down following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The robot was to take pictures of the interior and confirm the damage to one of the hatches on the containment vessel.
"We needed the machine to be compact, so we used a commercially available smartphone. The latest models are inexpensive but come with necessary features, including a camera, GPS and communication system," a spokesman said.
The smartphone was placed on the crawler's arm, which can move to capture images of both the roof and the floor. The crawler can climb over bumps smaller than 5 centimeters, the company said.
Tepco didn't say which brand of smartphone it used.
Similar robots have entered Fukushiima Daiichi previously, including some which succeeded in offering a glimpse of what inside the containment vessels look like. The vessels are highly contaminated with radiation.
The government last month granted its first compensation award to a construction worker at Fukushima, acknowledging that his leukemia could have been caused by radiation exposure.
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Source: Tepco Arms Fukushima Crawler With Commercial Smartphone
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