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

Visual and computational analysis of structure-activity relationships in high-throughput screening data

Novel analytic methods are required to assimilate the large volumes of structural and bioassay data generated by combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening programmes in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries. This paper reviews recent work in visualisation and data mining that can be used to develop structure-activity relationships from such chemical/biological datasets

Ontology of core data mining entities

In this article, we present OntoDM-core, an ontology of core data mining entities. OntoDM-core defines themost essential datamining entities in a three-layered ontological structure comprising of a specification, an implementation and an application layer. It provides a representational framework for the description of mining structured data, and in addition provides taxonomies of datasets, data mining tasks, generalizations, data mining algorithms and constraints, based on the type of data. OntoDM-core is designed to support a wide range of applications/use cases, such as semantic annotation of data mining algorithms, datasets and results; annotation of QSAR studies in the context of drug discovery investigations; and disambiguation of terms in text mining. The ontology has been thoroughly assessed following the practices in ontology engineering, is fully interoperable with many domain resources and is easy to extend

Designing algorithms to aid discovery by chemical robots

Recently, automated robotic systems have become very efficient, thanks to improved coupling between sensor systems and algorithms, of which the latter have been gaining significance thanks to the increase in computing power over the past few decades. However, intelligent automated chemistry platforms for discovery orientated tasks need to be able to cope with the unknown, which is a profoundly hard problem. In this Outlook, we describe how recent advances in the design and application of algorithms, coupled with the increased amount of chemical data available, and automation and control systems may allow more productive chemical research and the development of chemical robots able to target discovery. This is shown through examples of workflow and data processing with automation and control, and through the use of both well-used and cutting-edge algorithms illustrated using recent studies in chemistry. Finally, several algorithms are presented in relation to chemical robots and chemical intelligence for knowledge discovery

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

Laser Based Mid-Infrared Spectroscopic Imaging – Exploring a Novel Method for Application in Cancer Diagnosis

A number of biomedical studies have shown that mid-infrared spectroscopic images can provide both morphological and biochemical information that can be used for the diagnosis of cancer. Whilst this technique has shown great potential it has yet to be employed by the medical profession. By replacing the conventional broadband thermal source employed in modern FTIR spectrometers with high-brightness, broadly tuneable laser based sources (QCLs and OPGs) we aim to solve one of the main obstacles to the transfer of this technology to the medical arena; namely poor signal to noise ratios at high spatial resolutions and short image acquisition times. In this thesis we take the first steps towards developing the optimum experimental configuration, the data processing algorithms and the spectroscopic image contrast and enhancement methods needed to utilise these high intensity laser based sources. We show that a QCL system is better suited to providing numerical absorbance values (biochemical information) than an OPG system primarily due to the QCL pulse stability. We also discuss practical protocols for the application of spectroscopic imaging to cancer diagnosis and present our spectroscopic imaging results from our laser based spectroscopic imaging experiments of oesophageal cancer tissue

Overview of Remaining Useful Life prediction techniques in Through-life Engineering Services

Through-life Engineering Services (TES) are essential in the manufacture and servicing of complex engineering products. TES improves support services by providing prognosis of run-to-failure and time-to-failure on-demand data for better decision making. The concept of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is utilised to predict life-span of components (of a service system) with the purpose of minimising catastrophic failure events in both manufacturing and service sectors. The purpose of this paper is to identify failure mechanisms and emphasise the failure events prediction approaches that can effectively reduce uncertainties. It will demonstrate the classification of techniques used in RUL prediction for optimisation of products’ future use based on current products in-service with regards to predictability, availability and reliability. It presents a mapping of degradation mechanisms against techniques for knowledge acquisition with the objective of presenting to designers and manufacturers ways to improve the life-span of components

A Survey on Graph Kernels

Graph kernels have become an established and widely-used technique for solving classification tasks on graphs. This survey gives a comprehensive overview of techniques for kernel-based graph classification developed in the past 15 years. We describe and categorize graph kernels based on properties inherent to their design, such as the nature of their extracted graph features, their method of computation and their applicability to problems in practice. In an extensive experimental evaluation, we study the classification accuracy of a large suite of graph kernels on established benchmarks as well as new datasets. We compare the performance of popular kernels with several baseline methods and study the effect of applying a Gaussian RBF kernel to the metric induced by a graph kernel. In doing so, we find that simple baselines become competitive after this transformation on some datasets. Moreover, we study the extent to which existing graph kernels agree in their predictions (and prediction errors) and obtain a data-driven categorization of kernels as result. Finally, based on our experimental results, we derive a practitioner's guide to kernel-based graph classification

Tracing sources of cadmium in agricultural soils: a stable isotope approach

Cadmium (Cd) is a biotoxic heavy metal, which is accumulated by plants and animals and thereby enters the human food chain (Gray et al. 2003). The application of phosphate fertilisers has also resulted in the long-term accumulation of Cd in agricultural soils around the world, including New Zealand (NZ). In 1997, the main source of NZ phosphate fertilisers was changed from Nauru island phosphate rocks (450 mg Cd kg-1 P) to a variety of phosphate rocks with lower Cd concentrations, in order to meet more stringent Cd limits in P fertiliser. Following this change, the accumulation of Cd in topsoil samples from the Winchmore research farm (South Island, NZ) was evaluated and was found to have plateaued post-2000 (McDowell, 2012). In this study, stable isotope analysis was used to trace the fate of Cd in Winchmore farm soils in order to determine the cause of the plateau. The isotope ratio of Cd (δ114/110Cd) was measured in pre-2000 and post-2000 phosphate fertilisers, phosphate rocks, topsoil (0-7.5 cm) and control (unfertilised) subsoil (25-30 cm) samples from the Winchmore site. The analysed topsoil samples were archived samples collected over the period 1959-2015. The isotopic compositions of fertilised topsoils ranged from δ114/110Cd = 0.08 ± 0.03 to δ114/110Cd = 0.27 ± 0.04, which were comparable to pre-2000 fertilisers (δ114/110Cd = 0.10 ± 0.05 to 0.25 ± 0.04) but distinct from the post-2000 fertilisers (δ114/110Cd range of -0.17 ± 0.03 to 0.01 ± 0.05) and control subsoil (δ114/110Cd = -0.33 ± 0.04) (Salmanzadeh et al., 2017). We combined this stable isotope data with Bayesian modelling to estimate the contribution of different sources of Cd. An open source Bayesian isotope mixing model implemented in Matlab (Arendt et al., 2015) was used here with some modifications to estimate the fractional contribution of different sources of Cd through time including pre- and post-2000 fertilisers, and the control soil. The Matlab code of Arendt et al., 2015 was modified to consider only one isotope system (rather than two), and fewer sources. This modelling confirmed the dominant contribution (about 80%) of Nauru-derived (i.e. pre-2000) fertilisers in increasing the Cd concentration in Winchmore soils. To help constrain the soil Cd mass balance we used an existing model (CadBal) (Roberts and Longhurst, 2005), to estimate residual soil Cd and output fluxes based on known P fertiliser application rates, the initial Cd concentration, farm and soil type, and soil dry bulk density. We incorporated the isotope data into the mass balance expression in order to evaluate the performance of CadBal in estimating the past topsoil Cd accumulation and predicting the future concentrations and isotope ratios of Cd (up to 2030 AD). The results of mass balance modelling confirm that recent applications of phosphate fertilisers have not resulted in an accumulation of Cd during the most recent period, thus Cd removal by either leaching or crop uptake has increased, which is consistent with the modelled isotope data (Figure 1). We can conclude that it becomes possible to distinguish the sources of Cd within the soil using stable Cd isotopes (Imseng et al., 2018) and that the residual Cd in topsoil at Winchmore still mainly originates from historical phosphate fertilisers (Salmanzadeh et al., 2017). One implication of this finding is that the contemporary applications of phosphate fertiliser are not resulting in further Cd accumulation. We aim to continue our research into Cd fate, mobility, and transformations in the NZ environment by applying Cd isotopes in soils and aquatic environments across the country. Figure 1. Results of Cd mass balance modelling in CadBal for the period of topsoil fertilisation including a prediction up to the year 2030 AD. (a) Mean concentration of Cd in the dryland treatment of Winchmore long-term irrigation trial (symbols) and the CadBal model (lines) outputs (red symbols = this study- plot 15 of Winchmore site; grey symbols = McDowell study-average of all plots; solid black line = dryland optimized CadBal from McDowell (2012) for all irrigation plots; black dashed line = Plot 15 dryland optimized CadBal-this study, first scenario; blue line = Plot 15 dryland optimized CadBal-this study, second scenario; red line = Plot 15 dryland optimized CadBal-this study, third scenario; red dashed line = Plot 15 dryland optimized CadBal-this study, fourth scenario); (b) Measured and modelled Cd isotope ratios based on CadBal outputs, isotope ratios measured in fertilisers and the fractionation factors of Wiggenhauser, et al. (2016); lines designate modelling scenarios as in (a), red dots are the third scenario with no fractionation (α factor not applied); (c) modeled scenario 3 (solid) and scenario 4 (dashed) isotope ratios in topsoil (red lines), leachate (blue lines) and pasture (green lines)