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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
Multi-robot team formation control in the GUARDIANS project
Purpose
The GUARDIANS multi-robot team is to be deployed in a large warehouse in smoke. The team is to assist firefighters search the warehouse in the event or danger of a fire. The large dimensions of the environment together with development of smoke which drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges for search and rescue operations. The GUARDIANS robots guide and accompany
the firefighters on site whilst indicating possible obstacles and the locations of danger and maintaining communications links.
Design/methodology/approach
In order to fulfill the aforementioned tasks the robots need to exhibit certain behaviours. Among the basic behaviours are capabilities to stay together as a
group, that is, generate a formation and navigate while keeping this formation.
The control model used to generate these behaviours is based on the so-called social potential field framework, which we adapt to the specific tasks required for the GUARDIANS scenario. All tasks can be achieved without central control, and some of the behaviours can be performed without explicit communication between the robots.
Findings
The GUARDIANS environment requires flexible formations of the robot team: the formation has to adapt itself to the circumstances. Thus the application has forced us to redefine the concept of a formation. Using the graph-theoretic terminology, we can say that a formation may be stretched out as a path or be compact as a star or wheel. We have implemented the developed behaviours in simulation environments as well as on real ERA-MOBI robots commonly referred to as Erratics. We discuss advantages and shortcomings of our model, based on the simulations as
well as on the implementation with a team of Erratics.</p
Formation of Multiple Groups of Mobile Robots Using Sliding Mode Control
Formation control of multiple groups of agents finds application in large
area navigation by generating different geometric patterns and shapes, and also
in carrying large objects. In this paper, Centroid Based Transformation (CBT)
\cite{c39}, has been applied to decompose the combined dynamics of wheeled
mobile robots (WMRs) into three subsystems: intra and inter group shape
dynamics, and the dynamics of the centroid. Separate controllers have been
designed for each subsystem. The gains of the controllers are such chosen that
the overall system becomes singularly perturbed system. Then sliding mode
controllers are designed on the singularly perturbed system to drive the
subsystems on sliding surfaces in finite time. Negative gradient of a potential
based function has been added to the sliding surface to ensure collision
avoidance among the robots in finite time. The efficacy of the proposed
controller is established through simulation results.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
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