Inspecta 1.0: Development of an Architectural Roadmap

Sandia National Laboratories is designing and developing an Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled smart digital assistant, Inspecta (International Nuclear Safeguards Personal Examination and Containment Tracking Assistant). The goal is to provide inspectors an (in-field) digital assistant that can perform tasks identified as tedious, challenging, or prone to human error. During 2021, Sandia defined the requirements for Inspecta based on reviews of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) publications and interviews with former IAEA inspectors. Sandia then mapped the requirements to current commercial or open-source technical capabilities to provide a development path for an initial Inspecta prototype while highlighting potential research and development tasks. Sandia selected a high-impact inspection task that could be performed by an early Inspecta prototype and is developing the initial architecture, including hardware platform. This paper describes the methodology for selecting an initial task scenario, the first set of Inspecta skills needed to assist with that task scenario and finally the design of Inspecta’s architecture and platform.