Beyond Teleoperation: Autonomous-Assisted Soil Sampling for Decontamination in Hazardous Environments Using a Walking Excavator

Zusammenfassung (Abstract) :

The decontamination of legacy nuclear or other hazardous waste sites is a critical task that exposes human workers to significant risks. This paper presents a robotic system designed to mitigate human exposure by enabling remote, operator-supervised soil sampling using a retrofitted industrial walking excavator. Our integrated approach allows a single operator at a safe distance to supervise the entire soil sampling mission, from site mapping to task execution. The system's architecture seamlessly combines (1) a cloud-based SLAM framework for generating consistent and accessible site maps; (2) a software stack for traversability estimation and navigation, enabling robust mobility in unstructured terrain; and (3) a shared autonomy manipulation framework where the operator designates a target and the robot autonomously executes the complex, safety-critical soil sampling motion. This paper outlines the system design and reports on the successful validation of its core components. In a local testbed designed to simulate hazardous waste sites, we validated several key systems on the semi-autonomous excavator: the cloud-based SLAM pipeline, local 3D reconstruction for real-time environment modeling, intuitive Cartesian control of the end-effector, the autonomous sampling workflow, and the navigation stack. Field experiments subsequently validated all necessary components for the complete sampling workflow, demonstrating the viability of our shared autonomy approach and establishing a promising foundation for future field deployment.