1,851 research outputs found
Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots
J. Monroy, J. Gonzalez-Jimenez, "Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots", Electronic Nose Technologies and Advances in Machine Olfaction, IGI Global, pp. 244--263, 2018, doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-3862-2.ch012
Versión preprint, con permiso del editorOut of all the components of a mobile robot, its sensorial system is undoubtedly among the most critical
ones when operating in real environments. Until now, these sensorial systems mostly relied on range
sensors (laser scanner, sonar, active triangulation) and cameras. While electronic noses have barely
been employed, they can provide a complementary sensory information, vital for some applications, as
with humans. This chapter analyzes the motivation of providing a robot with gas-sensing capabilities
and also reviews some of the hurdles that are preventing smell from achieving the importance of other
sensing modalities in robotics. The achievements made so far are reviewed to illustrate the current status
on the three main fields within robotics olfaction: the classification of volatile substances, the spatial
estimation of the gas dispersion from sparse measurements, and the localization of the gas source within
a known environment
Unmanned Robotic Systems and Applications
This book presents recent studies of unmanned robotic systems and their applications. With its five chapters, the book brings together important contributions from renowned international researchers. Unmanned autonomous robots are ideal candidates for applications such as rescue missions, especially in areas that are difficult to access. Swarm robotics (multiple robots working together) is another exciting application of the unmanned robotics systems, for example, coordinated search by an interconnected group of moving robots for the purpose of finding a source of hazardous emissions. These robots can behave like individuals working in a group without a centralized control
On the use of autonomous unmanned vehicles in response to hazardous atmospheric release incidents
Recent events have induced a surge of interest in the methods of response to releases of hazardous materials or gases into the atmosphere. In the last decade there has been particular interest in mapping and quantifying emissions for regulatory purposes, emergency response, and environmental monitoring. Examples include: responding to events such as gas leaks, nuclear accidents or chemical, biological or radiological (CBR) accidents or attacks, and even exploring sources of methane emissions on the planet Mars. This thesis presents a review of the potential responses to hazardous releases, which includes source localisation, boundary tracking, mapping and source term estimation. [Continues.]</div
Information-based search for an atmospheric release using a mobile robot: algorithm and experiments
Finding the location and strength of an unknown hazardous release is of paramount importance in emergency response and environmental monitoring, thus it has been an active research area for several years known as source term estimation. This paper presents a joint Bayesian estimation and planning algorithm to guide a mobile robot to collect informative measurements, allowing the source parameters to be
estimated quickly and accurately. The estimation is performed recursively using Bayes’ theorem, where uncertainties in the
meteorological and dispersion parameters are considered and the intermittent readings from a low-cost gas sensor are addressed
by a novel likelihood function. The planning strategy is designed to maximize the expected utility function based on the estimated information gain of the source parameters. Subsequently, this paper presents the first experimental result of such a system in turbulent, diffusive conditions, in which a ground robot
equipped with a low-cost gas sensor responds to the hazardous source stimulated by incense sticks. The experimental results
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed estimation and search algorithm for source term estimation based on a mobile
robot and a low-cost sensor
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
Dual Control for Exploitation and Exploration (DCEE) in Autonomous Search
This paper proposes an optimal autonomous search framework, namely Dual
Control for Exploration and Exploitation (DCEE), for a target at unknown
location in an unknown environment. Source localisation is to find sources of
atmospheric hazardous material release in a partially unknown environment. This
paper proposes a control theoretic approach to this autonomous search problem.
To cope with an unknown target location, at each step, the target location is
estimated by Bayesian inference. Then a control action is taken to minimise the
error between future robot position and the hypothesised future estimation of
the target location. The latter is generated by hypothesised measurements at
the corresponding future robot positions (due to the control action) with the
current estimation of the target location as a prior. It shows that this
approach can take into account both the error between the next robot position
and the estimate of the target location, and the uncertainty of the estimate.
This approach is further extended to the case with not only an unknown source
location, but also an unknown local environment (e.g. wind speed and
direction). Different from current information theoretic approaches, this new
control theoretic approach achieves the optimal trade-off between exploitation
and exploration in a unknown environment with an unknown target by driving the
robot moving towards estimated target location while reducing its estimation
uncertainty. This scheme is implemented using particle filtering on a mobile
robot. Simulation and experimental studies demonstrate promising performance of
the proposed approach. The relationships between the proposed approach,
informative path planning, dual control, and classic model predictive control
are discussed and compared
Integrating Olfaction in a Robotic Telepresence Loop
In this work we propose enhancing a typical
robotic telepresence architecture by considering olfactory and wind flow information in addition to the common audio and video channels. The objective is to expand the range of applications where robotics telepresence can be applied, including those related to the detection of volatile chemical substances (e.g. land-mine detection, explosive deactivation, operations
in noxious environments, etc.). Concretely, we analyze how the sense of smell can be integrated in the telepresence loop, covering the digitization of the gases and wind flow
present in the remote environment, the transmission through
the communication network, and their display at the user location. Experiments under different environmental conditions are presented to validate the proposed telepresence system when
localizing a gas emission leak at the remote environment.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech
Small business innovation research. Abstracts of completed 1987 phase 1 projects
Non-proprietary summaries of Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) projects supported by NASA in the 1987 program year are given. Work in the areas of aeronautical propulsion, aerodynamics, acoustics, aircraft systems, materials and structures, teleoperators and robotics, computer sciences, information systems, spacecraft systems, spacecraft power supplies, spacecraft propulsion, bioastronautics, satellite communication, and space processing are covered
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