Hands up who wants to do maintainance inspections in nuclear power plants? No, me neither – it’s not a job that people queue up for. So robots are the obvious answer, but how will they be able to see their surroundings well enough to do a proper survey? Nature abounds with great templates for technology, and this time the super-accurate sonar skills of bats are the inspiration for a new breed of experimental inspection robots here in the UK. They’re still at the proof-of-concept stage, of course, but the developers hope to have the end product doing the business within a decade or so.
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If you’re wondering what sort of places the bots might get to crawl into, there’s an armchair tour of a nuclear plant, via a thriller novel written by a longtime nuke employee, available at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com . There’s no cost to readers – who seem to like it, judging from their homepage comments.