Serving the disaster market is pretty awful. There's little to no money available until something goes wrong, then there's a ton of money and everything is purchased in 5 days.
You have to have enough capital to be able to wait until something bad happens as well as enough inventory to service all the requests when the disaster occurs.
I personally think 'disaster market' is a terrible way to refer to people in need. I realize that business is business, but they could also release it as open-source, or set up something like the Raspberry Pi non-profit.
Some people do want to help the world, even if there's little to no money available.
It still costs money to design and build this equipment, sadly. "Helping the world" can't feed your family. =/
Raspberry Pi non-profit is awesome - but they made a very low cost, very versatile product. This is so unlike disaster equipment as to be impossible to their firm design.
Nuclear work is a whole different kettle of fish - you need to harden all of the sensitive parts of the system. Cameras will fail (or their lenses will frost over), circuitry will fail, and your robot needs to be able to be decontaminated when it gets back.
Fukushima has lots of problems for robots - hard radiation, not enough in air bandwidth to support radio communication and control, and terribly difficult maneuvering and communication conditions.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...
Very nice build