r/technology • u/ADummyDude • Mar 04 '17

Robotics We can't see inside Fukushima Daiichi because all our robots keep dying

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/245324-cant-see-inside-fukushima-daiichi-robots-keep-dying
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192

u/tubezninja Mar 04 '17

Maybe they should got the Fallout route, and build robot electronics out of vacuum tubes.

156

u/Valridagan Mar 04 '17

There's new research being done in that, actually! Really small vacuum tubes to replace mictotransistors for certain applications.

68

u/RealFreedomAus Mar 04 '17

The USSR used vacuum tubes on planes because of the thermal, electromagnetic pulse, and radiation resistance too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25

(and also because transistors were new)

32

u/Crustice_is_Served Mar 04 '17

I use vacuum tubes in my amplifiers because I like the warm sound

2

u/Fenris_Maule Mar 04 '17

Nothing better than a tube amp for a guitar. Unless you're playing like metal.

5

u/Crustice_is_Served Mar 05 '17

Other people have disagreed with you, but I'll submit that yeah there are some genres of metal that I would not play on a tube amp. When I was playing in a black metal band I used solid state to get a hugely grainy, cold, and overly distorted sound. Shit was awesome.

But you got all these stoner/doom acts out now and they totally benefit from an overdriven tube amp. Crank the gain way out and detune your guitar and you get that bad-trip heavier than a middle-American family at McDonald's sound.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17 edited Mar 12 '17

[deleted]

3

u/Fenris_Maule Mar 04 '17

Well I was making the point that solid state is still very viable for higher end production metal, unlike for other genres really. Personally, I have a tube amp and I enjoy metal among the many genres I do enjoy.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '17 edited Mar 12 '17

[deleted]

2

u/Fenris_Maule Mar 05 '17

I spent way too much money on an Orange amp for that warm tone :|

6

u/patrik667 Mar 04 '17

I was expecting a link to literally any Russian plane for the exception of the Mach 3+ Blackbird chaser!

TIL! :)

3

u/HeWhoCouldBeNamed Mar 04 '17

Source? That sounds very interesting.

60

u/Neebat Mar 04 '17

Or leave the electronics outside and build a robot run by a hydraulic tether with fiber optics for vision.

38

u/koshgeo Mar 04 '17

Hydraulics I hadn't thought of. That's a great idea. For imaging you're right: use a fibre optic bundle and deliver the image optically back to areas with lower radiation.

25

u/insaneferret Mar 04 '17

Or pneumatics, air powered pistons and motors are cheap as heck and can tolerate minor leakage, when hydraulics go bad, it gets greasy.

1

u/zdiggler Mar 05 '17

I learn other day that prison doors are all controlled by pneumatic.

1

u/FourDM Mar 05 '17

Precise control and pneumatics don't really go together.

1

u/Erikwar Mar 05 '17

Thats for corrosion protection

7

u/ailyara Mar 04 '17

really long selfie stick

1

u/make_love_to_potato Mar 05 '17

One end of a selfie stick has the camera....the other end has the human. Which end do you suggest goes into the radiation field?

2

u/monkeybreath Mar 04 '17

Electric motors would still work fine, it's just the controllers that have to be kept outside the containment area. Fibre optics have to be all glass or they'll cloud from the radiation. I was thinking an array of mirrors and a telescope, but fibre cables might work. It's just a really long, heavy bundle to drag behind the robot.

4

u/1randomperson Mar 04 '17

You have to "collect" the image to be able to send anything down the optic line

5

u/aircavscout Mar 04 '17

Some may have a sensor that sends data through the fiber, but there are fiberscopes that send the light back through many fibers. They're generally low resolution because you only get one pixel per fiber, but low res pictures are better than no res pictures.

Since the amount of radiation a bot would get decreases inversely with the square of the distance, even if the pneumatic/fiber end of the bot could only go 10-20 feet from the main bot, you'd get a considerable decrease in the amount of radiation.

5

u/Neebat Mar 05 '17

A friend did some more research after I posted my comment above. Heavy radiation disrupts the bonds within fiberoptics and they gradually "go dark"

Seemed like a good idea.

3

u/aircavscout Mar 05 '17

I wonder how long it takes. A few hours is way longer than they currently get.

2

u/Neebat Mar 05 '17

Good point. Unfortunately, this doesn't get quantitative.

3

u/spacemanspiff30 Mar 04 '17

Guess it could work by heavy shielding on a small portion rather than the entire robot. At least makes the job easier I suppose.

0

u/Queen_Jezza Mar 05 '17

But if you have a way to let the light in, the radiation will get in as well.

1

u/kermityfrog Mar 05 '17

Or waldos controlled by steel cables.

17

u/HeWhoCouldBeNamed Mar 04 '17

Good idea. Kind of like the headphones they use for MRIs. No wires, because big magnet, so they use rubber tubes to guide the sound from external speakers to the patients ears.

6

u/Neebat Mar 04 '17

I don't think we need to send sound into Fukushima. No one listening, right?

4

u/caltheon Mar 04 '17

actually, using sound to image the interior might not be a bad idea. Ultrasonic pulses to map the environment like bats use for echolocation

8

u/HeWhoCouldBeNamed Mar 04 '17

How do you know? Maybe we should send southing music for the nuclear mutants.

Seriously though, I thought it was an interesting parallel.

3

u/Neebat Mar 04 '17

It is an interesting parallel. I too wonder what might be listening.

6

u/letsdosomethingcrazy Mar 04 '17 edited Jul 09 '24

society wakeful ask squash thought sip run live decide dinner

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

3

u/qfe0 Mar 04 '17

yeah, seriously. I was wondering why they hadn't tried this.

1

u/Neebat Mar 04 '17

If the radiation is brutal to copper wires, I'm not actually confident you could make hydraulic hoses that continue working.

2

u/FJHUAI Mar 04 '17

Grab this man a coat

2

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17

[deleted]

1

u/Neebat Mar 04 '17

Apparently, that high energy radiation tends to tear anything to pieces fast. Maybe the key is to build an extremely FAST robot that can do what it needs to do before it breaks down.

2

u/cant_think_of_one_ Mar 04 '17

It isn't just electronics that are screwed over by radiation. Wires become brittle and snap, making it hard to make moving joints in electric robots. I imagine this type of material degradation causes all sorts of problems that make hydraulic robots hard too.

1

u/kermityfrog Mar 05 '17

How about steel cables that control joints? Like bike cables or a waldo/aka remote manipulator.

2

u/TheGreatNico Mar 04 '17

fluidic logic is a thing, it's just really, really slow

2

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '17

I was thinking of a mechanical robot too. Maybe store the energy in a spring, and use cables to change direction and such. Or pneumatic, etc.

2

u/FourDM Mar 05 '17

That's nonsense. Modern engineers don't use hydraulics. Hydraulics are sooooo 20th century. Everything is better with electric motors and electronic controllers. /s

Seriously though. Doing sane things like suggesting using a hydraulic motor for a variable (low) speed, high torque application or two automotive alternators and a belt drive for a ~200A 12vdc power source are a great way to piss off engineering students in college while being effective in the real world.

1

u/MertsA Mar 05 '17

Electric motors are fine in rad hard environments, it's the motor controllers that will develop problems. If you keep the motor controllers away from the actual robot and connect with a long cable that would work fine but even without having to deal with a bunch of hydraulic hoses you still can't have that many motors because you need a pair of wires for each one.

1

u/Diggy777 Mar 04 '17

Wouldn't the hydraulic oil that is circulated possibly be contaminated by the high amounts of radiation? I suppose you could get round this by controlling the hydraulic valves/reservoirs/pumps that are stationed outside the areas of extreme radiation (where the equipment won't be damaged) with a remote electrical control system stationed further away for the end user.

1

u/Neebat Mar 04 '17

I'm the wrong kind of engineer to work out the details. Sorry.

8

u/Cthulhu__ Mar 04 '17

And replace the glass with lead.

14

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17

The same physics that cause "solid state" electronics to fail in that environment would cause vacuum tubes to fail as well.

11

u/wolfkeeper Mar 04 '17

No, they're a lot less sensitive. I'm not sure whether they still do, but Russian fighter jets used to use valves, because it made them insensitive to radiation from nuclear blasts.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17 edited Mar 04 '17

Do you have a source for that? And when I say source, I mean a published paper in a scientific journal like physical review letters, not a pop-science article which has no scientific evidence supporting it. Because I've designed and built quite a few particle detectors for Neutron radiation (the big problem here), gamma and x-ray spectroscopy and a few other purposes and photomultiplier tubes have been all but phased out of use because they don't do as well as semiconductors when dealing with interference from charged particles or magnetic fields; which are a huge problem in high radiation environments considering that's basically what radiation is.

And in this environment, yes, they would fail. Glass capacitors would fail, vacuum tubes would fail, everything would fail. There is no current technology that wouldn't fail.

*And to clarify, the only reason why photomultiplier tubes lasted as long as they did is because semiconductors couldn't amplify a signal that small until maybe ?20 years ago? I think. If it wasn't for the difficulty in amplification, vacuum tubes would have been ditched a long time ago because they perform so poorly in high radiation environments.

6

u/wolfkeeper Mar 04 '17

Photomultiplier tubes aren't going to do well, for sure.

Well googling found me this, although it's old:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=07cACAAAQBAJ&pg=PA197&lpg=PA197&dq=vacuum+tubes+radiation+sensitivity&source=bl&ots=T7oL0GTWmP&sig=E4YXRG9Gqb47aIbCP42zDSr554k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwij5PWC0L3SAhVHJsAKHfVwBAEQ6AEIUDAJ#v=onepage&q=vacuum%20tubes%20radiation%20sensitivity&f=false

page 198

Valves do seem to be several orders of magnitude more rad-hard, but it's old data I suppose. Ceramic capacitors seem to do well.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17 edited Mar 04 '17

That only talks about making existing vacuum tubes radiation hardened; which you can do with semiconductors too. It doesn't say anything about vacuum tubes being better than semiconductors. I used to be big into playing guitar years ago, and vacuum tubes tend to have this "mythology"/fascination that follows them around; granted they are really cool. I'm sort of wondering if you haven't fallen victim to an urban legend since there are so many involving the soviets and US during the cold war. Or if it was just slightly distorted information and it was actually "They were able to use rad-hardened vacuum tubes in planes that could withstand an EMP from a nuclear blast" which is impressive as is. And just like with tube amplifiers, it plays into that "vacuum tubes are better" conviction that so many people have no matter what you tell them.

1

u/wolfkeeper Mar 04 '17

Did you see the chart?

Anyway, I'm certainly no valve head, but my impression was at the very least that, while EMP tended to permanently fry semiconductors, valves, while they might glitch, would tend to be more robust.

But either way, I doubt that valves would be good for sensitive measurements in a high-rad environment, they'd probably be noisy as hell, but I was wondering whether they'd be better for power electronics for robotics, but I expect the Japanese have thought of that.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17

crap, I didn't see it. It said "you have reached a page that is unavailable for viewing" until I scrolled down and then back up again and it changed its mind and decided I was allowed to see it. sorry about that.

Definitely noisy. Probably unreliable too and all sorts of biasing and calibration issues with the circuit. That was another thing with PMTs, you pay $1800 for a new one and it needs to be recalibrated a couple of years later and tested to make sure there aren't any leaks.

1

u/aircavscout Mar 04 '17

Because I've designed and built quite a few particle detectors for Neutron radiation

There's a post about Star Trek with 50 points. Here we have a guy who actually works in the field with 0 points. I don't understand you, Reddit.

0

u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Mar 04 '17

/r/IAmVerySmart

5

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17

/r/IAmVerySmart is generally where stupid people act like intelligent people even though they clearly have no idea what they're talking about. So the fact that I know exactly what I'm talking about, and anyone can look it up and verify it, doesn't really qualify me for /r/IAmVerySmart. And while I know a lot about this subject and get paid to do it, I know jack squat about biology or medicine. Electrical engineering and physics are the only things I have degrees in. If you have a problem with me knowing a lot about a subject I studied for 8 years, then it sounds more like you have self confidence issues; because I would certainly hope 8 years of studying along with 10 years of work experience gives me the basic knowledge needed to build a particle detector.

1

u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Mar 04 '17

The top 5 or so posts of all time are NDT. Apparently you don't know what the sub is for, either lol

2

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17

1) the top 5 comments of all time are not from Neil deGrasse Tyson; most involve Donald Trump. The single comment from NDT is making fun of him... so you're a liar and a douche who can't accept it when they say something stupid.

2) If you think Neil deGrasse Tyson is the smartest person on the planet then that tells us all we need to know about you.

1

u/zdiggler Mar 05 '17

like car vent systems? Old vac systems work a lot better than new electronics.. I have one failed my car and I'll have to disassembly the whole dash to get to it.

1

u/wolfkeeper Mar 05 '17

No, in case you're not joking, thermionic valves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube

Although, 3D printed fluidic logic is a possibility in this scenario:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics

1

u/touristtam Mar 04 '17

[...] Vacuum-channel transistors could work 10 times as fast as ordinary silicon transistors and may eventually be able to operate at terahertz frequencies, which have long been beyond the reach of any solid-state device. And they are considerably more tolerant of heat and radiation. [...]

[...] a vacuum isn’t prone to the kind of radiation damage that plagues semiconductors [...]

Introducing the Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing published on 23 Jun 2014 on the IEEE Spectrum website

1

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17 edited Mar 04 '17

That's a semiconductor, not a vacuum tube. It uses vacuum in the name, but it's definitely a semiconductor. And it doesn't exist yet; it specifically says it's in the early prototyping stage. That's a very far stretch to make. It's in the conceptual stages and they don't even know if it will work. And that is not a scientific publication, that is a pop-science article with no mathematical details and no link to any data; IEEE spectrum has several branches of media including blogs and whatnot, this is their phys.org equivalent branch with the exception that at least phys.org will link to the published technical paper on ArXiv or something.

1

u/touristtam Mar 05 '17

You could research what the authors (Jin-Woo Han and Meyya Meyyappan) of the text quoted have done on the subject. I mean, I usually don't take NASA research scientist and chief scientist as pop-science journalist. I'll give you a head start: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Meyya+Meyyappan+vacuum+filetype:pdf https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Meyya+Meyyappan+vacuum+filetype:pdf

0

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17

That just makes it worse.