Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems and a Wireless Sensors Network for Radiological Accidents

A Reyes-Muñoz,M Gasull,C Barrado,E Pastor,J Guerrero-Ibáñez

doi:10.1155/2016/9437165

Abstract

In critical radiological situations, the real time information that we could get from the disaster area becomes of great importance. However, communication systems could be affected after a radiological accident. The proposed network in this research consists of distributed sensors in charge of collecting radiological data and ground vehicles that are sent to the nuclear plant at the moment of the accident to sense environmental and radiological information. Afterwards, data would be analyzed in the control center. Collected data by sensors and ground vehicles would be delivered to a control center using Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) as a message carrier. We analyze the pairwise contacts, as well as visiting times, data collection, capacity of the links, size of the transmission window of the sensors, and so forth. All this calculus was made analytically and compared via network simulations.

Highlights

Radiation monitoring is an essential part of any radiation protection program of a nuclear plant
When a ground vehicle appears in the Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) transmission range the RPAS collects all stored information by the ground vehicle and reconfigure its own flight plan in order to arrive on time to achieve communication with most of the other sensors during its active phase
Radioactivity is usually on objects that are on the ground. In this sense we propose a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that is consistent with the current plan for nuclear exercises of ASCO

Summary

Introduction

Radiation monitoring is an essential part of any radiation protection program of a nuclear plant. The use of RPAS as a relay system, acting as carrier of data retrieved from ground sensors has been studied in a list of previous works [7,8,9,10,11], both for statically allocated sensors, and mobile ground terminals Another approach is setting the sensors in a fleet of RPAS which collaborate in gathering data named flying ad-hoc networks or FANETs [12, 13]. When a ground vehicle appears in the RPAS transmission range the RPAS collects all stored information by the ground vehicle and reconfigure its own flight plan in order to arrive on time to achieve communication with most of the other sensors during its active phase. We developed a set of interfaces to simulate the geographical area of the nuclear plant in which the RPAS follows the flight plan to gather the sensors data.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion