The problem:
There is no shortage of hazardous work environments that require inspection, monitoring and surveying to maintain their operation, all of which are requisite for customers that seek to provide efficient asset management. One such example is the nuclear sector, which in the UK alone spends £2.3 billion annually on decommissioning activities. Many current techniques are primarily manual and put human workers in harm’s way, having to wear restrictive PPE and access a range of dangerous environments, such as radioactive or confined spaces. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has set four grand challenges, one of which is to reduce human decommissioning activities by 50%, by 2030.
The solution:
Ice Nine offers autonomous mobile robots to gather inspection and survey data. This data includes geospatial, visual and radioactive information. Ice Nine’s software architecture is modular in design, so that additional sensing capabilities can be integrated based on customer requirements. The robots can position accurate and reliable gathered data in environments with no prior, or out-of-date, CAD drawings, providing a digital twin of the customer’s assets.
Ice Nine’s robotic technology will be deployed in active nuclear decommissioning sites Dounreay, Magnox and Sellafield, with feedback gathered from these trials used to improve the technology and value proposition. Backed by these active trials and early adopters, the company will pitch for private investment.
Over the course of the Enterprise Fellowship and the following six months, Ice Nine will develop its innovation from TRL6 to TRL9, with CE marking of the system a primary goal.
Traction:
- Ice Nine Ltd was started through the Next Big Thing Competition at the University of Manchester, which offered seed money to start and develop the business.
- Successfully took part in the Innovate UK funded ICURe NxNW programme and received an Innovate UK COVID-19 response grant to develop a UV disinfection robotic platform.
