Ship Hull Repair Using A Swarm Of Autonomous Underwater Robots: A Self-Assembly Algorithm

When ships suffer hull damage at sea, quick and effective repairs are vital. In these scenarios where even minutes make a substantial difference, repair crews need every edge they can get. In this paper, we propose a self-assembly algorithm to be used by a homogeneous swarm of autonomous underwater robots to aggregate at the hull breach and use their bodies to form a patch of appropriate size to cover the hole. Our approach is inspired by existing modular robot technologies and techniques, which are used to justify the feasibility of the proposed system presented in this paper. We test the ability of the agents to form a patch for various breach sizes and location and investigate the effect of varying population density. The system is verified within the two-dimensional Netlogo simulation environment and shows how the system performance can be quantified in relation to the sizes of the breach and the swarm. The methodology and simulation results illustrate that the swarm robot approach presented in this paper forms an important contribution in the emergency ship hull repair scenario and compares much advantageously against the traditional shoring methods. We conclude by suggesting how the approach may be extended to a three-dim

Legged Fire Fighter Robot Movement Using PID

Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) control is a control system commonly used by industry. Approximately 90% of industrial equipment uses a PID controller because it is easy to use. In the Indonesian Fire Extinguisher Robot Contest (IFERC), the contested robots must follow the contours of the walls of the arena. A Fire extinguisher robot navigation was chosen because the race arena of the competition consisted of walls with different aisles and rooms. The navigation robots used PID control. This study designed and implemented a control algorithm for legged fire extinguishing robots using the PID method, where the PID control was processed in a microcontroller. The angles for each servo motor generated by the calculation of the PID enable the robot to navigate by taking decisions to move quickly or slowly, turn right, turn left and stop. The robot's proximity sensor data and fire sensors enable the fire to be extinguished. The result showed that the robot can carry out its duties optimally

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