Robots MIA in Fukushima

Inside a nondescript warehouse south of Mannheim, Germany, a dozen robots, ranging in size from a low-slung inspection bot no bigger than a toy wagon to a 22-ton Caterpillar excavator, stand ready to respond to a nuclear emergency. With their electronics hardened to withstand radiation, the versatile machines can handle fuel rods as well as monitor doses that would kill a human engineer.

A similar robotic quick-response squad is housed near the Chinon nuclear power plant in France.

But in Japan, where the Fu­kushima Daiichi nuclear crisis drags into its third week, the question is: Where are the robots?

The answer is disquieting, say Japan's top roboticists. Instead of building robots that go where humans never could, this country renowned for its robotics expertise invested in machines that do things that humans can already do - like talk, dance, play the violin and preside over weddings.

"The government believed this accident wouldn't happen," said Hirose Shigeo, a robotics researcher at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. "Most of the robot experts are concentrating on humanoid [robots] and home use."

After a 1999 accident at a nuclear fuel processing facility in Tokai in which two workers died from radiation exposure, the Japanese government and the company operating the facility began developing radiation-resistant robots. But after a year, the trade ministry halted the project, said Shigeo and Tadokoro.

Another Japanese agency, the Nuclear Safety Technology Center, constructed two robots equipped with cameras and hazardous-materials monitors. One, called Monirobo, was dispatched to Fukushima last week, according to Japanese news reports. But representatives of Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the Daiichi facility, aren't saying how, or even whether, the robot is being used on-site.

Shigeo said a robot developed in his lab, called Helios IX, could fill the reconnaissance niche. The machine can climb stairs, open doors, and monitor temperature and radiation. If its cameras aimed at the spent fuel pools, they could show whether water cannons operated by ground crews were refilling the pools or simply splashing streams onto the floor.

After the crisis began more than two weeks ago, Shigeo upgraded the radio communications on Helios IX so it can be guided from longer distances and through the heavy concrete of the Daiichi plant. So far, though, no one has requested his help - or that of his robot.