Airborne chemical sensing with mobile robots

Airborne chemical sensing with mobile robots has been an active research areasince the beginning of the 1990s. This article presents a review of research work in this field,including gas distribution mapping, trail guidance, and the different subtasks of gas sourcelocalisation. Due to the difficulty of modelling gas distribution in a real world environmentwith currently available simulation techniques, we focus largely on experimental work and donot consider publications that are purely based on simulations

Improvement of the sensory and autonomous capability of robots through olfaction: the IRO Project

Proyecto de Excelencia Junta de Andalucía TEP2012-530Olfaction is a valuable source of information about the environment that has not been su ciently exploited in mobile robotics yet. Certainly, odor information can contribute to other sensing modalities, e.g. vision, to successfully accomplish high-level robot activities, such as task planning or execution in human environments. This paper describes the developments carried out in the scope of the IRO project, which aims at making progress in this direction by investigating mechanisms that exploit odor information (usually coming in the form of the type of volatile and its concentration) in problems like object recognition and scene-activity understanding. A distinctive aspect of this research is the special attention paid to the role of semantics within the robot perception and decisionmaking processes. The results of the IRO project have improved the robot capabilities in terms of efciency, autonomy and usefulness.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

A survey on acoustic positioning systems for location-based services

Positioning systems have become increasingly popular in the last decade for location-based services, such as navigation, and asset tracking and management. As opposed to outdoor positioning, where the global navigation satellite system became the standard technology, there is no consensus yet for indoor environments despite the availability of different technologies, such as radio frequency, magnetic field, visual light communications, or acoustics. Within these options, acoustics emerged as a promising alternative to obtain high-accuracy low-cost systems. Nevertheless, acoustic signals have to face very demanding propagation conditions, particularly in terms of multipath and Doppler effect. Therefore, even if many acoustic positioning systems have been proposed in the last decades, it remains an active and challenging topic. This article surveys the developed prototypes and commercial systems that have been presented since they first appeared around the 1980s to 2022. We classify these systems into different groups depending on the observable that they use to calculate the user position, such as the time-of-flight, the received signal strength, or the acoustic spectrum. Furthermore, we summarize the main properties of these systems in terms of accuracy, coverage area, and update rate, among others. Finally, we evaluate the limitations of these groups based on the link budget approach, which gives an overview of the system's coverage from parameters such as source and noise level, detection threshold, attenuation, and processing gain.Agencia Estatal de InvestigaciónResearch Council of Norwa

A Semantic Labeling of the Environment Based on What People Do

In this work, a system is developed for semantic labeling of locations based on what people do. This system is useful for semantic navigation of mobile robots. The system differentiates environments according to what people do in them. Background sound, number of people in a room and amount of movement of those people are items to be considered when trying to tell if people are doing different actions. These data are sampled, and it is assumed that people behave differently and perform different actions. A support vector machine is trained with the obtained samples, and therefore, it allows one to identify the room. Finally, the results are discussed and support the hypothesis that the proposed system can help to semantically label a room.The research leading to these results has received funding from the RoboCity2030-III-CMproject (Robótica aplicada a la mejora de la calidad de vida de los ciudadanos. fase III; S2013/MIT-2748), funded by Programas de Actividades I+Den la Comunidad de Madrid and cofunded by Structural Funds of the EU and NAVEGASEAUTOCOGNAVproject (DPI2014-53525-C3-3-R), funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain.The research leading to these results has received funding from the RoboCity2030-III-CMproject (Robótica aplicada a la mejora de la calidad de vida de los ciudadanos. fase III; S2013/MIT-2748), funded by Programas de Actividades I+Den la Comunidad de Madrid and cofunded by Structural Funds of the EU and NAVEGASEAUTOCOGNAVproject (DPI2014-53525-C3-3-R), funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain

Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A Peer-Reviewed Monograph

Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.Comment: 52 pages, 6 Figures, over 40 references, reviewed by a reade

Motion-induced sound level control for socially-aware robot navigation

With the growing presence of robots in human populated environments, it becomes necessary to render the relation between robots and humans natural, rather than invasive. For that purpose, robots need to make sure the acoustic noise induced by their motion does not disturb people that are in the same environment. This dissertation proposes a method that allows a robot to learn how to control the amount of noise it produces, taking into account the environmental context and the robot’s mechanical characteristics. The robot performs its task while adapting its speed, so it produces less acoustic noise than the environment’s, and thus, not disturbing nearby people. Before the robot can execute a task in a given environment, it needs to learn how much noise it induces while moving at different speeds on that environment. For that, a microphone was installed on a wheeled robot to gather information about it’s acoustic noise. To validate the proposed solution, tests in different environments with different background sounds were performed. After that, a PIR sensor was installed on the robot to verify the ability of the robot to use the motion controller when someone enters the sensor’s field of vision. This second test demonstrated the possibility of using the proposed solution in another systems.Com a crescente presença dos robôs no espaço ocupado pelos seres humanos, é necessário que a relação entre robôs e humans seja natural e não invasiva. Para alcançar este objectivo, é preciso que os robôs tenham formas de assegurar que o ruído causado pelos seus movimentos não incomodam as pessoas inseridas no meio envolvente. Esta dissertação propôe uma solução que permite que um robô aprenda a controlar a quantidade de ruído que produz, tendo em conta as suas caracteristicas e o meio ambiente onde é colocado. O robô concretiza as suas tarefas adaptando a sua velocidade de forma a produzir menos ruído que o presente no meio ambiente e, assim, não incomodar as pessoas. Para que o robô possa executar alguma tarefa num determinado ambiente, é necessário aprender a quantidade de ruído que faz ao movimentar-se a diferentes velocidades nesse ambiente. Para tal, um microfone foi instalado num robô com rodas para obter informação sobre a sua acústica. Para validar a solução proposta, foram realizados testes, com sucesso, em diferentes ambientes com diferentes ruídos de fundo. Posteriormente, foi instalado no robô um sensor PIR para analizar a capacidade do robô executar o controlador de velocidade quando alguém entra no campo de visão do sensor. Este segundo teste demonstrou a possibilidade de incluir a solução proposta em outros sistemas