An overview of robotics and autonomous systems for harsh environments

Across a wide range of industries and applications, robotics and autonomous systems can fulfil the crucial and challenging tasks such as inspection, exploration, monitoring, drilling, sampling and mapping in areas of scientific discovery, disaster prevention, human rescue and infrastructure management, etc. However, in many situations, the associated environment is either too dangerous or inaccessible to humans. Hence, a wide range of robots have been developed and deployed to replace or aid humans in these activities. A look at these harsh environment applications of robotics demonstrate the diversity of technologies developed. This paper reviews some key application areas of robotics that involve interactions with harsh environments (such as search and rescue, space exploration, and deep-sea operations), gives an overview of the developed technologies and provides a discussion of the key trends and future directions common to many of these areas

Design of novel adaptive magnetic adhesion mechanism for climbing robots in ferric structures

The work presented in this thesis proposes a novel adaptive magnetic adhesion mechanism that can be implemented in most locomotion mechanisms employed in climbing robots for ferric structures. This novel mechanism has the capability to switch OFF and ON its magnetic adhesion with minimal power consumption, and remain at either state after the excitation is removed. Furthermore, the proposed adhesion mechanism has the ability to adapt the strength of the adhesive force to a desired magnitude. These capabilities make the proposed adhesion mechanism a potential solution in the field of wall climbing robots. The novel contributions of the proposed mechanism include the switching of the adhesive force, selectivity of the adhesive force magnitude; determination of the parameters that have an impact in the final adhesive force. Finally, a final prototype is constructed with customised components and it is subject to a set of simulations and experiments to validate its performance

Collective Construction by Termite-Inspired Robots

Construction usually involves careful preplanning and direct human operation of tools and material. Bringing automation to construction has the potential to improve its speed and efficiency, and to enable building in settings where it is difficult or dangerous for humans to work, e.g., in extraterrestrial environments or disaster areas. Nature provides us with impressive examples of animal construction: in particular, many species of termites build complex mounds several orders of magnitude larger than themselves. Inspired by termites and their building activities, our goal is to develop systems in which large numbers of robots collectively construct human-scale structures autonomously. In this thesis I present TERMES, a system comprised of (1) A high-level control algorithm for decentralized construction of 3D user-specified structures using stigmergy, exploiting implicit rather than explicit communication; and (2) A complete physical implementation where three robots reliably assemble such structures using only local sensing, limited locomotion, and simple control, exploiting embodied rather than explicit intelligence. A major contribution of this work is the translation from abstract models to a real robotic system. I achieved this through careful co-design of algorithms and physical systems and of robots and building material, allowing passive mechanical features to minimize control complexity. To attain reliable performance without relying on costly high-precision sensors and actuators, I put an emphasis on error-tolerant control, making robots able to autonomously detect and recover from small errors. This work advances the aim of engineering collectives of robots that achieve human-specified goals, using biologically-inspired principles for robustness and scalability. While our work is inspired by models of termite construction from the 1970s and 1980s, much is still unknown about how individual termites coordinate and respond to different environmental factors. To address this issue I developed methods and tools to enable high-resolution quantitative data collection on the behavior of individual termites engaged in collective construction in confined experimental arenas. This work advances our ability to study the termites which will hopefully lead to new insights on the design of robust autonomous systems for collective construction.Engineering and Applied Science

Robotics 2010

Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development