RLAB: A Remotely Operated Laboratory for Improved Management of Hazardous Spills

Highway spills of hazardous substances expose emergency response personnel and the public at large to the risk of explosion, fire, and contamination. When the spill is of an unknown substance, response personnel must first determine its identity. Problems of human exposure make automated or remotely controlled sampling and analysis as a logical approach for this operation. The State of California’s Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has sponsored a pair of project that demonstrate this approach – a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to sample an unknown substance and a remotely operated laboratory (RLAB) to identify the substance. The paper describes the conceptual design of the RLAB. Key issues includes the selection of a method of identifying unknowns, the tradeoff between complexity and functionality, the division of labor between the RLAB and its human operator, the interaction between the ROV and the RLAB, and the possible use of historical spill data to speed the identification of unknowns.