Development of an autonomous mobile towing vehicle for logistic tasks

Frequently carrying high loads and performing repetitive tasks compromises the ergonomics of individuals, a recurrent scenario in hospital environments. In this paper, we design a logistic planner of a fleet of autonomous mobile robots for the automation of transporting trolleys around the hospital, which is independent of the space configuration, and robust to loss of network and deadlocks. Our robotic solution has an innovative gripping system capable of grasping and pulling nonmodified standard trolleys just by coupling a plate. Robots are able to navigate autonomously, to avoid obstacles assuring the safety of operators, to identify and dock a trolley, to access charging stations and elevators, and to communicate with the latter. An interface was built allowing users to command the robots through a web server. It is shown how the proposed methodology behaves in experiments conducted at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porta and Braga's Hospital.This work is financed by the ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation- COMPETE 2020 Programme, and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project SAICTPAC/0034/2015 - POCI-01- 0145-FEDER-016418. Authors would like to acknowledge to Trivalor, Itau and Gertal for the support of the project RDH.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Next Generation IMR RROV/AUV/eROV operations

Master's thesis in Technology and Operations ManagementThe oil and gas industry is rapidly changing. The oil price is fluctuating and there has currently been an excess of personnel. Today's Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) operations are demanding and costly, requiring a support vessel at all times. As subsea assets are aging, the need for inspection and new technology at a lower cost is increasing. The specific problem for this thesis was to: ● Challenge today’s operations setup and mindset of ROV operation and look into future Resident ROV (RROV) / Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and Empowered ROV (eROV) operations. ● Demonstrate possible economic benefit by adapting to new concepts and new technologies (business driven innovation). New technologies such as Resident ROV (RROV) and Empowered ROV (eROV) are currently introduced and under development. The main feature of this technology is that it allows for remote piloting from an Onshore Control Center (OCC). There appears to be a paradigm change in which the ROV and the industry is becoming more and more electrified and autonomous. Comparison is made to other industries such as the aviation and automobile industry. In the latter, there is a powertrain shift moving to hybrids and electric vehicles. Key words in this new paradigm are “autonomous”, “resident” and “electric” (ref. FFU conference 2017). This master thesis investigates ROV operations and the state of the art technology that is currently available. It outlines how the Company’s operations are planned and executed today and details new ROV technology under development. The thesis also reviews the Company’s resources available and estimates cost of establishing and running an Onshore Control Center (OCC). As a theoretical basis, the master thesis uses Integrated (remote) Operations, Digitalization trends, Sharing Economy and Cost Effectiveness, Scenario Thinking and Dynamic resources and capabilities. Today’s operations are planned manually. It requires a surface support vessel at all times due to the umbilical connected to the ROV. The ROV is controlled locally from the vessel. These operations are costly and gives limited flexibility. An incentive for removing the umbilical - ROV working independently - has been going on for decades. New developing technology allows signals to be transferred via fiber or using telecommunications, which opens up for controlling the ROV from an OCC. An OCC will give more flexibility because one ROV crew can control several ROVs at different locations subsea. This gives operational benefits. Until ROVs in the future are fully autonomous (long term future scenario), a supporting vessel is required to move the eROV from one location to the other. The thesis uses towing as a concept to put the new eROV technology into an “operational context” in order to maximize use of the eROV concept. Future operations also require a subsea infrastructure with hubs/docking stations to recharge the eROV and gain access to tooling etc. Until an infrastructure is fully established, relocation of the eROV from one location to another should be looked into in more detail - to optimize operations. Better planning and sharing of resources could lead to a more sustainable business model. This thesis shows that it is feasible to use towing as a method to relocate the ROV if the eROV concept is fully introduced and developed. During the study the importance of people, processes and governance appeared - rather than just focusing on new technology. In order to succeed implementing new technology it is important that man, technology and organisation are connected and that collaboration is recognized. If the cost assumptions in this thesis are correct, and if sharing of other support vessels/optimized operations is viable, the eROV concept could be a more sustainable business model. A certain number of ROV hours are needed to get the hourly ROV rate down as it is very costly to run an OCC around the clock (24 hours a day, 7 days a week)

ISME research trends: Marine robotics for emergencies at sea

One of the main recent research trends of the Italian Interuniversity Research Center on Integrated Systems for Marine Environment (ISME) is the use of marine cooperative teams of autonomous robots within the fields of security, prevention and management of emergencies at sea. Such fields are of worldwide interest for obvious reasons, but they have recently gained relevance in the current historical moment, especially in the Mediterranean sea. Within such a dramatic context, the use of robots could certainly provide helpful for the execution of patrolling and detection, identification and classification of interesting elements, such as people to be saved or oil leaks, as well as the successive execution of the intervention/rescue strategy. This paper presents the Key Enabling Technologies as well as some Key Research Areas that are being currently investigated by ISME toward the ambitious objective of employing robotic solutions for the management of emergencies at sea

Mechanical design of a four wheel omni directional mobile robot

Mestrado em ESTG-IPBOmni directional mobile robots have been popularly employed in several applications, especially in soccer player robots considered in Robocup competitions. Actually, the popular optimized robots are using three wheels in the mechanical structure. This situation brings the idea of omnidirectional robot at manufacturing. To design the omnidirectional wheels mobile robot respecting the requirement specifications of the factory lite competition, it’s recommended to design and optimize the proposed solution using Solidworks tool. To design a mobile robot using four omni wheels, it’s important to implement suspension system for each wheel. The suspension system will help the programmer when implementing the PID parameters and test the robot. Such a robot can respond more quickly and it would be capable of more sophisticated behaviors such as to transport materials and placed on processing machine and outgoing warehouses. This thesis has tried to focus the description of four wheel omnidirectional mobile robot to be applied to the Factory Lite competition

Earthmoving construction automation with military applications: Past, present and future

© ISARC 2018 - 35th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction and International AEC/FM Hackathon: The Future of Building Things. All rights reserved. Amongst increasing innovations in frontier engineering sciences, the advancements in Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) has brought about a new horizon in construction applications. There is evidence of the increasing interest in RAS technologies in the civil construction sector being reflected in construction efforts of many military forces. In particular, Army or ground-based forces are frequently called upon to conduct construction tasks as part of military operations, tasks which could be partially or fully aided by the employment of RAS technologies. Along with recent advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical system infrastructure, it is essential to examine the current maturity, technical feasibility, and affordability, as well as the challenges and future directions of the adoption and application of RAS to military construction. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and provides a contemporary and industry-independent overview on the state-of-the-art of earthmoving construction automation used in defence, spanning current world’s best practice through to that which is predicted over the coming years

The military glider revisited

No Abstract

Thrust control design for unmanned marine vehicles

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Mechanical Engineering, Izmir, 2012Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 65-70)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishxv, 74 leavesIn conventional electrically driven propulsion systems with fixed pitch propellers, thruster controllers are usually aimed at controlling propeller shaft speed only. Especially in unmanned marine vehicles which operate in dynamic flow conditions, these type thruster controllers provide unsatisfactory thrust responses. The reason for this is that the thrust force is simultaneously affected by dynamic effects like, variable ambient flow velocity and angle, thruster-thruster interaction and ventilation. It is aimed to achieve acceptable thrust tracking accuracy in all kind of dynamic flow conditions in this thesis work. A novel feed-back based thruster controller which includes the effect of incoming axial flow velocity, is designed for this purpose. In controller design, first, thruster propeller's open water characteristics in four-quadrant flow states are measured. Data collected from open water tests are then non-dimensionalized and embedded in the controller's thrust model code. Relation between ideal shaft speed and desired thrust is derived by using the four-quadrant propeller model. The proposed method is evaluated in the experimental test-setup designed for this study to simulate open water conditions. Results indicate that thrust tracking performance of novel controller is acceptable in all four-quadrant flow tests

An Extension of BIM Using AI: a Multi Working-Machines Pathfinding Solution

Multi working-machines pathfinding solution enables more mobile machines simultaneously to work inside of a working site so that the productivity can be expected to increase evolutionary. To date, the potential cooperation conflicts among construction machinery limit the amount of construction machinery investment in a concrete working site. To solve the cooperation problem, civil engineers optimize the working site from a logistic perspective while computer scientists improve pathfinding algorithms’ performance on the given benchmark maps. In the practical implementation of a construction site, it is sensible to solve the problem with a hybrid solution; therefore, in our study, we proposed an algorithm based on a cutting-edge multi-pathfinding algorithm to enable the massive number of machines cooperation and offer the advice to modify the unreasonable part of the working site in the meantime. Using the logistic information from BIM, such as unloading and loading point, we added a pathfinding solution for multi machines to improve the whole construction fleet’s productivity. In the previous study, the experiments were limited to no more than ten participants, and the computational time to gather the solution was not given; thus, we publish our pseudo-code, our tested map, and benchmark our results. Our algorithm’s most extensive feature is that it can quickly replan the path to overcome the emergency on a construction site