MIRRAX: A Reconfigurable Robot for Limited Access Environments

The development of mobile robot platforms for inspection has gained traction in recent years with the rapid advancement in hardware and software. However, conventional mobile robots are unable to address the challenge of operating in extreme environments where the robot is required to traverse narrow gaps in highly cluttered areas with restricted access. This paper presents MIRRAX, a robot that has been designed to meet these challenges with the capability of re-configuring itself to both access restricted environments through narrow ports and navigate through tightly spaced obstacles. Controllers for the robot are detailed, along with an analysis on the controllability of the robot given the use of Mecanum wheels in a variable configuration. Characterisation on the robot's performance identified suitable configurations for operating in narrow environments. The minimum lateral footprint width achievable for stable configuration ($<2^\text{o}$~roll) was 0.19~m. Experimental validation of the robot's controllability shows good agreement with the theoretical analysis. A further series of experiments shows the feasibility of the robot in addressing the challenges above: the capability to reconfigure itself for restricted entry through ports as small as 150mm diameter, and navigating through cluttered environments. The paper also presents results from a deployment in a Magnox facility at the Sellafield nuclear site in the UK -- the first robot to ever do so, for remote inspection and mapping.Comment: 10 pages, Under review for IEEE Transactions on Robotic

Low Power Processor Architectures and Contemporary Techniques for Power Optimization – A Review

The technological evolution has increased the number of transistors for a given die area significantly and increased the switching speed from few MHz to GHz range. Such inversely proportional decline in size and boost in performance consequently demands shrinking of supply voltage and effective power dissipation in chips with millions of transistors. This has triggered substantial amount of research in power reduction techniques into almost every aspect of the chip and particularly the processor cores contained in the chip. This paper presents an overview of techniques for achieving the power efficiency mainly at the processor core level but also visits related domains such as buses and memories. There are various processor parameters and features such as supply voltage, clock frequency, cache and pipelining which can be optimized to reduce the power consumption of the processor. This paper discusses various ways in which these parameters can be optimized. Also, emerging power efficient processor architectures are overviewed and research activities are discussed which should help reader identify how these factors in a processor contribute to power consumption. Some of these concepts have been already established whereas others are still active research areas. © 2009 ACADEMY PUBLISHER

Development of personal area network (PAN) for mobile robot using bluetooth transceiver

The work presents the concept of providing a Personal Area Network (PAN) for microcontroller based mobile robots using Bluetooth transceiver. With the concept of replacing cable, low cost, low power consumption and communication range between 10m to 100m, Bluetooth is suitable for communication between mobile robots since most mobile robots are powered by batteries and have high mobility. The network aimed to support real-time control of up to two mobile robots from a master mobile robot through communication using Bluetooth transceiver. If a fast network radio link is implemented, a whole new world of possibilities is opened in the research of robotics control and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research works, sending real time image and information. Robots could communicate through obstacles or even through walls. Bluetooth Ad Hoc topology provides a simple communication between devices in close by forming PAN. A system contained of both hardware and software is designed to enable the robots to form a PAN and communicating, sharing information. Three microcontroller based mobile robots are built for this research work. Bluetooth Protocol Stack and mobile robot control architecture is implemented on a single microcontroller chip. The PAN enabled a few mobile robots to communicate with each other to complete a given task. The wireless communication between mobile robots is reliable based from the result of experiments carried out. Thus this is a platform for multi mobile robots system and Ad Hoc networking system. Results from experiments show that microcontroller based mobile robots can easily form a Bluetooth PAN and communicate with each other

Reconfigurable production control systems: beyond ADACOR

In the recent evolution of production control systems, the emergence of decentralized systems capable of dealing with the rapid changes in the production environment better than the traditional centralized architectures has been one of the most significant developments. The agent-based and holonic paradigms symbolize this approach, and ADACOR holonic control architecture is a successful example of such a system. In this paper, authors discusses the current challenges and the way to go in the direction of new, reconfigurable, evolvable and ubiquitous systems, able to respond to current production environment demands and variability

Towards Declarative Safety Rules for Perception Specification Architectures

Agriculture has a high number of fatalities compared to other blue collar fields, additionally population decreasing in rural areas is resulting in decreased work force. These issues have resulted in increased focus on improving efficiency of and introducing autonomy in agriculture. Field robots are an increasingly promising branch of robotics targeted at full automation in agriculture. The safety aspect however is rely addressed in connection with safety standards, which limits the real-world applicability. In this paper we present an analysis of a vision pipeline in connection with functional-safety standards, in order to propose solutions for how to ascertain that the system operates as required. Based on the analysis we demonstrate a simple mechanism for verifying that a vision pipeline is functioning correctly, thus improving the safety in the overall system.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2015 (arXiv:1601.00877