Idaho National Laboratory

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory based in Idaho Falls, Idaho, working across nuclear energy technologies, nuclear fuel development, materials science, and energy security. Robotics and remote systems work at INL is grounded in the practical constraints of nuclear facilities: high-radiation and contaminated environments where human access is limited or prohibited, and where equipment must be qualified for reliability, maintainability, and predictable failure modes rather than laboratory convenience.

Remote systems operations at INL support work at major on-site facilities, including the Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC), which conducts materials and nuclear fuels research, and the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR), a research reactor used for nuclear research and testing. Robotics engineering in this context spans manipulator and mobility hardware, teleoperation and supervised autonomy, radiation-tolerant sensing and computation, and materials characterization for harsh environments - problems where the hardware/software boundary is shaped by dose limits, glovebox and hot-cell geometry, and the cost of a failed deployment.

The laboratory is federally funded and collaborates with universities, industry partners, other national laboratories, international research organizations, and federal agencies. For engineers, that means work tied to real deployments in nuclear and national-security settings, with requirements traceable to operational missions in energy and scientific research rather than to consumer or commercial product cycles.