1,178 research outputs found
Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review
Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today.
Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work
closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue
situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain,
and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely
raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint.
Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and
shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically
survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for
domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal
welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether
animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated
in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is
used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not
isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote
data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart
technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well
as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to
motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication
management as well as policy for animal welfare
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Indoor And Outdoor Real Time Information Collection in Disaster Scenario
A disaster usually severely harms human health and property. After a disaster, great amount of information of a disaster area is needed urgently. The information not only indicates the severity of the disaster, but also is crucial for an efficient search and rescue process. In order to quickly and accurately collect real time information in a disaster scenario, a mobile platform is developed for an outdoor scenario and a localization and navigation system for responders is introduced for an indoor scenario.
The mobile platform has been integrated to the DIORAMA system. It is built with a 6-wheel robot chassis along with an Arduino microcontroller. Controlled by a mounted Android smartphone, the mobile platform can receive commands from incident commanders and quickly respond to the commands. While patrolling in a disaster area, a constant RFID signal is collected to improve the localization accuracy of victims. Pictures and videos are also captured in order to enhance the situational awareness of rescuers.
The design of the indoor information collection is focused on the responder side. During a disaster scenario, it is hard to track responders’ locations in an indoor environment. In this thesis, an indoor localization and navigation system based on Bluetooth low energy and Android is developed for helping responders report current location and quickly find the right path in the environment. Different localization algorithms are investigated and implemented. A navigation system based on A* is also proposed
A decentralized framework for multi-agent robotic systems
Over the past few years, decentralization of multi-agent robotic systems has become an important research area. These systems do not depend on a central control unit, which enables the control and assignment of distributed, asynchronous and robust tasks. However, in some cases, the network communication process between robotic agents is overlooked, and this creates a dependency for each agent to maintain a permanent link with nearby units to be able to fulfill its goals. This article describes a communication framework, where each agent in the system can leave the network or accept new connections, sending its information based on the transfer history of all nodes in the network. To this end, each agent needs to comply with four processes to participate in the system, plus a fifth process for data transfer to the nearest nodes that is based on Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and data history. To validate this framework, we use differential robotic agents and a monitoring agent to generate a topological map of an environment with the presence of obstacles
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A novel wireless mobile platform integrated with optical fibre sensors
This paper presents a novel design of wireless mobile platform which enables effective integration of a number of optical fibre sensors with an advanced mobile wireless sensor network (WSN) and allows for potential applications such as monitoring in remote and harsh environments and tracking, exploiting fully the advantages offered both by mobile WSN and by advanced optical fibre sensing technologies. The platform which was designed and implemented consists of an optical fibre sensor module and a smart mobile WSN module, which shows important advantages for mobile sensing and tracking and mesh networking. In this study, a fibre Bragg grating (FBG)-based temperature sensor was specially designed and integrated successfully into the optical fibre sensor module as an exemplar to investigate the performance of the integrated system based on the mobile WSN platform. The positive experimental results obtained have confirmed the functionality of the platform designed and demonstrated its capacity for real-time optical fibre sensor data monitoring, processing and wireless transmission. The successful creation of this type of wireless mobile platform with optical fibre sensors would be expected to make an important impact on many sectors, where either conventional optical sensor designs or WSNs alone cannot meet the systems requirements
Optimal Mission Planning of Autonomous Mobile Agents for Applications in Microgrids, Sensor Networks, and Military Reconnaissance
As technology advances, the use of collaborative autonomous mobile systems for various applications will become evermore prevalent. One interesting application of these multi-agent systems is for autonomous mobile microgrids. These systems will play an increasingly important role in applications such as military special operations for mobile ad-hoc power infrastructures and for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. In performing these operations with these autonomous energy assets, there is a crucial need to optimize their functionality according to their specific application and mission. Challenges arise in determining mission characteristics such as how each resource should operate, when, where, and for how long.
This thesis explores solutions in determining optimal mission plans around the applications of autonomous mobile microgrids and resource scheduling with UGVs and UAVs. Optimal network connections, energy asset locations, and cabling trajectories are determined in the mobile microgrid application. The resource scheduling applications investigate the use of a UGV to recharge wireless sensors in a wireless sensor network. Optimal recharging of mobile distributed UAVs performing reconnaissance missions is also explored. With genetic algorithm solution approaches, the results show the proposed methods can provide reasonable a-priori mission plans, considering the applied constraints and objective functions in each application. The contributions of this thesis are: (1) The development and analysis of solution methodologies and mission simulators for a-priori mission plan development and testing, for applications in organizing and scheduling power delivery with mobile energy assets. Applying these methods results in (2) the development and analysis of reasonable a-priori mission plans for autonomous mobile microgrids/assets, in various scenarios. This work could be extended to include a more diverse set of heterogeneous agents and incorporate dynamic loads to provide power to
Small scale implementation of a robotic urban search and rescue network
Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2012With the advancement of robotics technologies, it is now possible to use robots for high risk jobs that have historically been accomplished by humans. One such example is the use of robots for Urban Search and Rescue (USR): finding chemical spills, fires, or human survivors in disaster areas. With the ability to include inexpensive wireless transceivers, it is possible to network numerous robots as part of a swarm that can explore an area much more expeditiously than a single robot can. With the inclusion of wireless capabilities comes the necessity to create a protocol for the communication between robots. Also necessary is the creation of an exploration protocol that allows the network of robots to explore such a building or search area in as little time as possible yet as accurately as possible. This thesis covers the development of such a network of robots, starting with the hardware/software co-design, the individual robots' control mechanisms, and their mapping and communications protocols
Wireless Sensor Networks for Building Robotic Paths - A Survey of Problems and Restrictions
The conjugation of small nodes with sensing, communication and processing capabilities allows for the
creation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These networks can be deployed to measure a very wide
range of environmental phenomena and send data from remote locations back to users. They offer new and
exciting possibilities for applications and research. This paper presents the background of WSNs by firstly
exploring the different fields applications, with examples for each of these fields, then the challenges faced
by these networks in areas such as energy-efficiency, node localization, node deployment, limited storage
and routing. It aims at explaining each issue and giving solutions that have been proposed in the research
literature. Finally, the paper proposes a practical scenario of deploying a WSN by autonomous robot path
construction. The requirements for such a scenario and the open issues that can be tackled by it are
exposed, namely the issues of associated with measuring RSSI, the degree of autonomy of the robot and
connectivity restoration.The authors would like to acknowledge the
company Inspiring Sci, Lda for the interest and
valuable contribution to the successful development
of this work.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
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