Barry Lennox

AVEXIS—Aqua Vehicle Explorer for In-Situ Sensing

The AVEXIS (aqua vehicle explorer for in-situ sensing) underwater vehicles have been developed to allow characterization and monitoring of hazardous underwater environments with limited access points. A number of forms of the vehicle are being developed to assist in the decommissioning of the Sellafield nuclear facilities in Cumbria, U.K. The vehicles have been designed to be low-cost and have been constructed using novel manufacturing methods, such as 3D printing, which allows them to be built quickly and adds a high level of flexibility to the design. An acoustic communications and positioning system has also been developed which can be integrated into the vehicle or used as a stand-alone system which can be retrofitted onto existing vehicles.

A sensor network for predicting and maintaining occupant comfort

This paper describes a sensor network that has been designed and deployed to monitor the environmental conditions within a large multi-use building. The conditions measured across this network include temperature, humidity, light levels, ambient sound level, room occupancy and an informal survey of occupant comfort level. The nodes were designed to be low cost with the intention that a significant number of them could be deployed around large buildings. In the initial study described in this paper, a network comprising 17 prototypes nodes has been deployed in a multi-use university building. The sensor network is Ethernet based and uses the buildings existing infrastructure for communication with a central server which stores the recorded data. Preliminary analysis of the data collected from this sensor network over a period of 10 months combined with data from a local meteorological station and data from the buildings fiscal energy meters is presented. The overall goal of the project is to use the data from the network to find more energy efficient methods of heating the building while maintaining occupant comfort. In particular, it is anticipated that the data collected from the network will identify parameters, other than temperature, which are indicative of occupant comfort. To determine this, the current work is focussed on building a classifier to predict occupant comfort level, given the data measured by the sensor nodes combined with data from a local weather station and the buildings smart energy meters. Analysis of the identified model should indicate which variables most influence occupant comfort. The project also aims to produce a dataset which may be used for future research and aid design of sensor networks.

Developing a Student—Focused Undergraduate Laboratory

Laboratories are an essential component of our undergraduate curricula in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Manchester. In this paper we discuss the development of laboratories for one of our undergraduate control modules. Students have been involved at all stages of the development and have directed the work. The result is a highly successful laboratory package that has been received with enthusiasm.

ROS Integration for Miniature Mobile Robots

In this paper, the feasibility of using the Robot Operating System (ROS) for controlling miniature size mobile robots was investigated. Open-source and low-cost robots employ limited processors, hence running ROS on such systems is very challenging. Therefore, we provide a compact, low-cost, and open-source module enabling miniature multi and swarm robotic systems of different sizes and types to be integrated with ROS. To investigate the feasibility of the proposed system, several experiments using a single robot and multi-robots were implemented and the results demonstrated the amenability of the system to be integrated in low-cost and open-source miniature size mobile robots.

Radiation Tolerance of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Components Deployed in an Underground Nuclear Decommissioning Embedded System

Robotics and embedded systems are increasingly used and deployed in harsh environments such as nuclear decommissioning and radioactive waste handling. Development of new, low-cost, robotic solutions, requires commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components to survive radioactive exposure. Understanding the response of these components to γ-radiation is important for safe and reliable deployment. Power supply regulation and microcontrollers have been highlighted as sensitive to radiation and this study determines experimentally the characteristics of degradation for COTS voltage references, voltage regulators and a microcontroller. The findings lead to development of a discrete voltage regulator constructed with individual BJTs that exhibits increased radiation tolerance.

A Hybrid Underwater Acoustic and RF Localisation System for Enclosed Environments Using Sensor Fusion

Underwater localisation systems are traditionally based on acoustic range estimation, which lacks the accuracy to localise small underwater vehicles in enclosed structured environments for mapping and surveying purposes. The high attenuation of electromagnetic waves underwater can be exploited to obtain a more precise distance estimation over short distances. This work proposes a cooperative localisation system that combines an acoustic absolute localisation system with peer-to-peer distance estimation based on electromagnetic radio frequency (RF) attenuation between multiple robots. The proposed system is able to improve the position estimation of a group of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) or Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs) for exploring enclosed environments.

A Bio-inspired Aggregation with Robot Swarm Using Real and Simulated Mobile Robots

This paper presents an implementation of a bio-inspired aggregation scenario using swarm robots. The aggregation scenario took inspiration from honeybee’s thermotactic behaviour in finding an optimal zone in their comb. To realisation of the aggregation scenario, real and simulated robots with different population sizes were used. Mona, which is an open-source and open-hardware platform was deployed to play the honeybee’s role in this scenario. A model of Mona was also generated in Stage for simulation of aggregation scenario with large number of robots. The results of aggregation with real- and simulated-robots showed reliable aggregations and a population dependent swarm performance. Moreover, the results demonstrated a direct correlation between the results observed from the real robot and simulation experiments.

Nondestructive Testing of Nonmetallic Pipelines Using Microwave Reflectometry on an In-Line Inspection Robot

Microwave and millimeter-wave reflectometry, a form of continuous-wave surface penetrating radar, is an emerging nondestructive inspection technique that is suitable for nonmetallic pipelines. This paper shows a

Control Improvement using Small-Scale MPC: A Case Study of pH Control for Brine Dechlorination

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On the design of a remotely-deployed detection system for reactor assessment at Fukushima Daiichi

-band microwave reflectometry instrument implemented onto an in-line pipe-crawling robot, which raster-scanned cracks and external wall loss on a high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe of diameter 150 mm and wall thickness 9.8 mm. The pipe was scanned with three environments surrounding the pipe that approximated the use cases of overground HDPE pipelines, plastic-lined metal pipes, and undersea HDPE pipelines. The instrument was most sensitive when cracks were oriented parallel to its magnetic (H) plane. Any small variation in the standoff distance between the instrument’s probe antenna and the pipe wall, which was not easy to avoid, was found to obscure the image. To mitigate this problem, a sensitivity analysis showed that an optimal frequency can be chosen at which standoff distance can vary by up to ±0.75 mm within a certain range without distorting the indications of defects on the image.