Cadet Ammon Okazaki has been working to repurpose an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) robot into a system that can autonomously detect and map gamma radiation fields. He is working with scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and U.S. Army officers pursuing graduate degrees in nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. The project is sponsored by USMA's Robotics Research Center (RRC) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's (DTRA) Nuclear Science and Engineering Research Center (NSERC). Ammon started working on it this past semester as part of an independent research course. During the past spring semester, he designed an adjustable mounting assembly for the array of sensors and explored alternate detector configurations to optimize the directional sensitivity of the system.
As part of his Academic Individual Advanced Development (AIAD) experience, Ammon has adjusted his mounting scheme and 3-D printed his design for use on the unmanned ground vehicle. Additionally, he has been using UC Berkeley's high-performance computing cluster to run high-fidelity stochastic models of the detector systems and writing code to efficiently extract data from the output. He has also had the opportunity to see some of the other innovative radiation detection research that is going on at LBNL in the Applied Nuclear Physics program as well as explore the food, culture, and attractions of the Bay area.