A School of Robotic Fish for Mariculture Monitoring in the Sea Coast

This paper presents a multi-agent robotic fish system used for mariculture monitoring. Autonomous robotic fish is designed to swim underwater to collect marine information such as water temperature and pollution level. Each robotic fish has 5 degrees of freedom for controlling its depth and speed by mimicking a sea carp. Its bionic body design enables it to have high swimming efficiency and less disturbance to the surrounding sea lives. Several onboard sensors are equipped for autonomous 3D navigation tasks such as path planning, obstacle avoidance and depth maintenance. A robotic buoy floating on the water surface is deployed as a control hub to communicate with individual robots, which in turn form a multi-agent system to monitor and cover a large scale sea coast cooperatively. Both laboratory experiments and field testing have been conducted to verify the feasibility and performance of the proposed multi-agent system

3D Mapping by a Robotic Fish with Two Mechanical Scanning Sonars

3D mapping is one of themost significant abilities for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). This paper proposes a 3Dmapping algorithm for a robotic fish using two mechanical scanning sonars (MSSs) with one being forward-looking and the other downward-looking. Combined with inertial measurement unit (IMU), the forward-lookingMSSis used for 2DSLAM(simultaneous localization and mapping) by which the 2D poses of the vehicle are optimally obtained by applying a pose-based GraphSLAM. Based on the estimated 2D poses, depth and orientation, the measurements from the downward-looking sonar are used to build the 3D map by adapting 3D mapping algorithm Octomap while taking into account the pose uncertainty. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by extensive simulations which also show that it can generate more informative 3D map than the scenario where no uncertainty of poses is considered

Design and Implementation of User Friendly Remote Controllers for Rescue Robots in Fire Sites

Robot applications with rescue operations have been widely developed for disaster prevention purposes such as fire-fighting robot, rescue robot, and surveillance robot. This paper proposes two novel wireless remote controllers which offer not only user friendly operating interface but also easy robot controls. The handheld type controller is able to be easily carried by fire fighters and the joystick based controller enables more accurate and rapid controls for specified tasks in emergence environment. Both controllers are designed to be capable of gathering environment information such as video data, temperature, gas concentration and etc. Through the performance evaluation and questionnaire survey with a mobile rescue robot system, we have analyzed their efficiency considering fire fighter's usability. Then by accepting the opinions of fire fighters, we suggest applicable scenarios for both controllers in expected fire sites. © 2010 SICE.1