The Enrich robot competition has taken place for the fourth time at the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant on the Danube Cycle Path from Passau to Vienna. Despite being an ugly, gray concrete cube that contrasts with the beautiful castles and ruins along the route, the power plant serves as a training environment for repairs, emergency operations, and dismantling. It is also a technology museum, event location, and test arena for rescue robots.
The robots in the competition are tasked with detecting sources of radioactive radiation previously hidden by specialists from the Austrian Armed Forces and marking their position on 3D maps created with the help of the robots. The robots must also demonstrate their ability to manipulate by closing the valves of pipes containing radioactive liquid and find and rescue injured people represented by dolls.
For the first time, the competition has a separate category for flying robots or UAVs that create digital environment and radiation maps. However, only two of the 15 teams participating this year have registered for this category. One of the teams, Tiers from the Finnish University of Turku, has also brought the first walking robot that explores the nested rooms of the nuclear power plant.
The Austrian-German team flyby, a cooperation between the clubs robo4you and addi, is participating only with flying robots, a large hexacopter for creating maps and one to three smaller quadrocopters that maintain communication within the meter-thick reinforced concrete walls of the reactor building.
Team Capra from Canada has also joined the Enrich competition this year, bringing with them their chain-driven robot, Markhor. The competition, which is likely the only one in the world that allows working with radioactive radiation sources in a real environment, is still healthy, according to the competition manager Frank Schneider from Fraunhofer FKIE.
