Nuclear facilities often require continuous mo nitoring to ensure there is no contamination of radioactive materials that might lead to safety or environmental issues. The current approach to radiological monitoring is to use human operators, which is both time consuming and cost in efficient. As with many repetitive, routine tasks, there are considerable opportunities for the process to be improved using autonomous robotic systems. This article describes the design and development of an autonomous, groundbased radiologicalmonitoring robot, Continuous Autonomous RadiationMonitoring Assistance (CARMA), and how, when it was deployed in an active area at the U.K. 's Sellafield nuclear site, it detected and located a fixed a source embedded into the floor. This deployment was the first time that a fully autonomous robot had ever been deployed at Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Europe. Expanding Efforts in an Increasingly Important FieldMonitoring nuclear facilities and rapidly identifying any spread of radiological materials is of global concern.

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The development of mobile robot platforms for inspection has gained traction in recent years. However, conventional mobile robots are unable to address the challenge of operating in extreme environments where the robot is required to traverse narrow gaps in highly cluttered areas with restricted access, typically through narrow ports. This paper presents MIRRAX, a robot designed to meet these challenges by way of its reconfigurable capability. Controllers for the robot are detailed, along with an analysis on the controllability of the robot given the use of Mecanum wheels in a variable configuration. Characterisation on the robot's performance identified suitable configurations for operating in narrow environments. Experimental validation of the robot's controllability shows good agreement with the theoretical analysis, and the capability to address the challenges of accessing entry ports as small as 150mm diameter, as well as navigating through cluttered environments. The paper also presents results from a deployment in a Magnox facility at the Sellafield nuclear site in the UK -the first robot to ever do so, for remote inspection and mapping.