After Japanese and German technology failed, Ukraine officials have turned to a Pennsylvania robotics company for assistance in planning the cleanup of Chernobyl. RedZone Robotics of Pittsburgh is building a special radiation-resistant robot called Pioneer that will go into service sometime next year.
Pioneer weighs in at one ton and can withstand an accumulative total of one million rads.
Pioneer will go inside the cement sarcophagus that now encloses Chernobyl's damaged Unit 4. Pioneer's core-sampling equipment will provide a structural assessment of the structure which is reported to be crumbling. All of this information is necessary to planning an environmentally sound cleanup of the plant. RedZone is an outgrowth of the Field Robotics Center, part of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. RedZone Chairman and CEO J. Todd Simonds served as a research scientist and associate director of the Institute until 1987 when he founded RedZone.