6 March 1998

Robotics Institute's Asbestos Removal Robot Places Second in National Design Competition

BOA, an asbestos insulation eating robot conceived by Robotics Institute Systems Scientist Hagen Schempf, and developed by a team of students and technicians under his direction, has taken second place in a national design competition sponsored by the trade publication Design News.

Chosen from more than 100 entries, BOA was cited as one of the most innovative new product designs developed in the US in 1997. It's featured in the March issue of the magazine and will be on display at the National Design Engineering Show and Conference, which will be held in Chicago March 16-19.

BOA, which stands for "Big on Asbestos," is being developed under a $2 million, three-and-a-half-year contract from the Department of Energy's (DoE) Federal Energy Technology Center (FETC) in Morgantown, W. Va. The project is part of a robotics technology development program initiated by DoE to help decontaminate and clean up its nuclear weapons sites and other polluted areas.

"Most of the steam and process piping in DoE facilities is insulated with asbestos containing materials," says Schempf. "They have to be removed before any decontamination and dismantling can take place. Up to now," he says, "asbestos abatement has been done by humans. It's slow, costly and dangerous because asbestos is carcinogenic. DoE was looking for a better, safer, faster and cheaper way to do it."

The BOA project got underway in 1994. The challenge, Schempf says, was to build an automatic system containing sensors, actuators, computers and cutting equipment that was small enough, yet capable enough to handle hazardous, loose material in a constrained environment.

The researchers developed a mechanical system that's placed on vertical or horizontal piping by remote control. The device then crawls along on the outside of the pipes and removes the insulation materials. It wets them, encapsulates the stripped pipe with a fast drying adhesive and bags the removed insulation at the site.

The device was demonstrated last summer at DoE's Oakridge, Tennessee, facility. It will be field tested again at another site in May.

Schempf says BOA is the creation of at least 15 people. Some were undergraduate students. Two -- Eric Rollins and William Schnorr -- were master's degree candidates in engineering. The rest of the team included John Bares, head of the Robotics Engineering Consortium, Anthony Oscar Nolla, Nathan Everett, Edward Mutschler, Brian Chemel, Scott Boehmke, Colin Piepgras, William Crowley, Todd Camill and Clint Apland.

"This was a great team effort," he says. "I give myself credit for conceiving the system concept. I give everything else to the engineers and students who did all the work."

Schempf says he is considering a commercial future for BOA. The robot operates at a rate of 30 feet per hour, about 10 times faster than a person can. "Today," he says, "the only competition for BOA is humans."

BOA is one of several projects Schempf has developed that address environmental problems. The first was Neptune, a small, crawling robot developed for the Army Corps of Engineers and Raytheon that inspected the interiors of large petroleum storage tanks. The second is Houdini, a reconfigurable work machine that DoE is using at Argonne National Laboratories and at Oakridge for removal of radioactive sludge from storage tanks.

Schempf joined the robotics Institute as a project scientist in 1990. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), respectively. He has a joint doctor's degree in mechanical and oceanographic engineering from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Early in his career, he developed underwater robots. Now, he's designing and developing the next-century operator console system (RoboCon) for man-machine interface control of remote and hazardous systems.

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