20 Decommissioning nuclear power plants is an immense task. The estimate for the Sellafield facility in Cumbria is £136 billion over more than a century. During the last 14 years, Barry Lennox, professor of applied control at the University of Manchester, has dedicated himself to developing robots that can save users time and money while reducing risk. Lennox was born in 1969 on the Wirral Peninsular across the River Mersey from Liverpool – close to the home ground of Tranmere Rovers football team, which he is still tribally obliged to support. While most of Lennox’s secondary school years were spent at the local Neston Comprehensive, between the ages of 11 and 13 he lived in the Shetland Islands (“great fun”), north of Scotland, as his father worked in the oil industry. Computerised guidance A mathematics teacher, Mr Dawson nurtured Lennox’s enthusiasm for the subject, which dovetailed with his passion for the emerging personal computers. Later, it was a larger computer, which the local council brought to the school in a van, that helped him choose a career path. “You entered the subjects that you liked and the grades you were getting into the computer, and it suggested what you should do,” Lennox recalls. The computer suggested chemical engineering, and he chose Newcastle University because it was satisfyingly far away from home while still in the north of England. A year spent travelling followed graduation, after which he took a job with a construction engineering company. He didn’t enjoy it and returned to education, pursuing a PhD in control systems, offered to him by Gary Montague, one of his former lecturers at Newcastle. Lennox earned his doctorate in 1996. Control systems expert Barry Lennox guides Peter Donaldson through his role in developing robots that make nuclear decommissioning safer and cheaper Rad-hard robotics April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Developed by the University of Manchester in co-operation with Forth Engineering, AVEXIS was deployed to inspect the Magnox swarf storage silos at Sellafield, and at Fukushima where it inspected submerged reactors with radiological and sonar sensors (Image courtesy of the University of Manchester)
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