Nuclear decommissioning is potentially the biggest and most impactful application for real-world service robotics in the coming few years, with huge societal importance.

In UK alone, cleaning up the past two-thirds of a century of nuclear waste represents the largest environmental remediation project in the whole of Europe, estimated to need €120-300billion over next 100 years. Worldwide decommissioning costs are of the order €1trillion. At least 20% of this work must be done by robots since the materials are too hazardous for humans, however the robotics technologies that are needed have not yet been developed.

Almost every kind of robotics is needed (grasping and manipulation of a huge variety of materials, ground vehicles, flying robots, snake-bots, SLAM, vision, multi-sensor fusion, human-robot interfaces) often in highly unstructured, cluttered and uncertain environments, which may be chemically, thermally and radiologically harsh, and often with very limited communications bandwidth between safe areas and the remote robot.