A 61 year-old retired engineer from Tokyo, Hiroshi Endo, was no stranger to creating robots for use in projects such as the International Space Station, but his biggest achievement came out of one of the worst disasters in human history. A Los Angeles Times article details how Endo created a robot to aid in the decommissioning of the Fukushima nuclear disaster site: In space, “you’ve got the sun, the moon, the Earth, temperatures. These are very definite, very specific — they’re not going to change,” Endo said. “But nuclear [reactors] are man-made. What’s going on inside the reactor is totally unknown, after the disaster. The operational environment is very different than space — it’s much harder.” Over the last five years, since an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown devastated a swath of Japan’s east coast, killing more than 15,000 people and displacing more than 230,000, the country has embarked on one of the most extensive recovery programs in history. Robots have played a crucial role in Japan’s efforts to inspect, decontaminate and ultimately decommission the devastated nuclear reactors — a necessary step to regaining public trust and consigning the accident to history. Experts say that more than 100 types of [...]