Advances in Sonar Technology

The demand to explore the largest and also one of the richest parts of our planet, the advances in signal processing promoted by an exponential growth in computation power and a thorough study of sound propagation in the underwater realm, have lead to remarkable advances in sonar technology in the last years.The work on hand is a sum of knowledge of several authors who contributed in various aspects of sonar technology. This book intends to give a broad overview of the advances in sonar technology of the last years that resulted from the research effort of the authors in both sonar systems and their applications. It is intended for scientist and engineers from a variety of backgrounds and even those that never had contact with sonar technology before will find an easy introduction with the topics and principles exposed here

An Incremental Navigation Localization Methodology for Application to Semi-Autonomous Mobile Robotic Platforms to Assist Individuals Having Severe Motor Disabilities.

In the present work, the author explores the issues surrounding the design and development of an intelligent wheelchair platform incorporating the semi-autonomous system paradigm, to meet the needs of individuals with severe motor disabilities. The author presents a discussion of the problems of navigation that must be solved before any system of this type can be instantiated, and enumerates the general design issues that must be addressed by the designers of systems of this type. This discussion includes reviews of various methodologies that have been proposed as solutions to the problems considered. Next, the author introduces a new navigation method, called Incremental Signature Recognition (ISR), for use by semi-autonomous systems in structured environments. This method is based on the recognition, recording, and tracking of environmental discontinuities: sensor reported anomalies in measured environmental parameters. The author then proposes a robust, redundant, dynamic, self-diagnosing sensing methodology for detecting and compensating for hidden failures of single sensors and sensor idiosyncrasies. This technique is optimized for the detection of spatial discontinuity anomalies. Finally, the author gives details of an effort to realize a prototype ISR based system, along with insights into the various implementation choices made

Cooperative Material Handling by Human and Robotic Agents:Module Development and System Synthesis

In this paper we present the results of a collaborative effort to design and implement a system for cooperative material handling by a small team of human and robotic agents in an unstructured indoor environment. Our approach makes fundamental use of human agents\u27 expertise for aspects of task planning, task monitoring, and error recovery. Our system is neither fully autonomous nor fully teleoperated. It is designed to make effective use of human abilities within the present state of the art of autonomous systems. It is designed to allow for and promote cooperative interaction between distributed agents with various capabilities and resources. Our robotic agents refer to systems which are each equipped with at least one sensing modality and which possess some capability for self-orientation and/or mobility. Our robotic agents are not required to be homogeneous with respect to either capabilities or function. Our research stresses both paradigms and testbed experimentation. Theory issues include the requisite coordination principles and techniques which are fundamental to the basic functioning of such a cooperative multi-agent system. We have constructed a testbed facility for experimenting with distributed multi-agent architectures. The required modular components of this testbed are currently operational and have been tested individually. Our current research focuses on the integration of agents in a scenario for cooperative material handling

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

An intelligent multi-floor mobile robot transportation system in life science laboratories

In this dissertation, a new intelligent multi-floor transportation system based on mobile robot is presented to connect the distributed laboratories in multi-floor environment. In the system, new indoor mapping and localization are presented, hybrid path planning is proposed, and an automated doors management system is presented. In addition, a hybrid strategy with innovative floor estimation to handle the elevator operations is implemented. Finally the presented system controls the working processes of the related sub-system. The experiments prove the efficiency of the presented system

Human Management of the Hierarchical System for the Control of Multiple Mobile Robots

In order to take advantage of autonomous robotic systems, and yet ensure successful completion of all feasible tasks, we propose a mediation hierarchy in which an operator can interact at all system levels. Robotic systems are not robust in handling un-modeled events. Reactive behaviors may be able to guide the robot back into a modeled state and to continue. Reasoning systems may simply fail. Once a system has failed it is difficult to re-start the task from the failed state. Rather, the rule base is revised, programs altered, and the task re-tried from the beginning