Use of Drones for Remote Management of the Close Measure of Radioactivity Sources

摘要

Sources of radioactivity are presents from rocks to nuclear power plant and weapons, alongside with medical instrumentation and treatments. Moderate doses of radioactivity can be useful, for instance, in medicine and technology. At high doses, however, radioactivity is dangerous to biological entities, and it is important to have a robust means for its detection, especially in cases of nuclear accidents such as the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan and Chernobyl's power plant in Ukraine. Other very interesting applications are the detection of illicit transportation of radioactive materials and orphan radioactivity sources. The main drawback of radioactivity detection systems is their limited detection range, decreasing its efficiency dramatically with squared distance to the source, in many cases leading to a significant radiological exposure for the operators of these systems. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles facilitate the possibility of making measurements without exposing personnel to harmful situations. In this project we use a drone FV8 equipped with a CsI scintillator in order to measure radioactivity sources. A cost, weight and consumption reduced computer (raspberry pi) running a Linux -based operating system is used to control the system. Data from the scintillator is acquired using its own software which carries out analysis to look for possible radiological incidences. There are two commercial applications of recognized prestige when analyzing the data (spectra) obtained, therefore, a virtualization mechanism has been implemented to allow the use of expert analysis using one of these software (Gammavision ([4])). A communication system has been developed based on the application of instantaneous messaging Telegram ([7]), which defines several access levels. So, data acquisition only can be triggered by users with appropriate permissions whilst users with observer permits can receive information about the event.