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Changda Tian

Field Robot Systems

EnRicH 2025: Air–Ground Robots for Nuclear Plant Inspection

A low-cost drone and ground vehicle team, built in three weeks and field-tested inside the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant at the European Robotics Hackathon.

Period
2025
Platform
Custom quadrotor · Ackermann UGV · ROS 2
Methods
SLAM · Radiation Mapping · Mesh Networking
With
RAICAM doctoral network team
Paper
RAICAM team members preparing the sensor-equipped ground vehicle on a workbench inside the Zwentendorf facility during the EnRicH hackathon.

Overview

EnRicH — the European Robotics Hackathon — puts robots inside the never-commissioned Zwentendorf nuclear power plant in Austria and asks teams to inspect, map, and find radiation sources in a real, GNSS-denied industrial environment. For the 2025 edition, our RAICAM team built a complete heterogeneous system — an aerial drone plus a ground vehicle — in roughly three weeks, prioritizing low cost, off-the-shelf components, and open-source software.

The system

  • Aerial: a quadrotor with a 3D-printed airframe for fast iteration.
  • Ground: an Ackermann-steering UGV carrying LiDAR, IMU, and radiation detection modules.
  • Autonomy: ROS 2 throughout, with SLAM and a hybrid autonomy paradigm to cope with GNSS denial inside the containment structures.
  • Communication: a modular mesh network with signal repeaters to punch through the plant’s heavily shielded interior.
System overview of the air-ground robotic solution: drone, ground vehicle, sensor suite, and communication architecture
System overview from the SSRR 2025 paper.

The mission

One of the hackathon missions was 3D-mapping the facility — a massive structure over 100 m long and 120 m wide, with two levels separated by more than 15 m in height. Field trials demonstrated robust localization, reliable communication despite severe attenuation, and real-time radiation monitoring.

The RAICAM team standing in front of the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant's chimney next to the EnRicH 2025 hackathon banner
The RAICAM team at the Zwentendorf plant during EnRicH 2025.

Outcome

The full system — mechanical designs, bills of materials, firmware, and the ROS 2 software stack — was released open source, and the work was published at IEEE SSRR 2025. For me, it was field robotics at its most honest: a hard deadline, a real plant, and no second chances on integration.

Publications

  • Low-Cost Rapid-Development Air-Ground Robotic Solution for Nuclear Power Plant Inspection. Changda Tian et al. IEEE SSRR 2025, pp. 84–89. DOI