Domenico Longo

The Alicia/sup 3/ climbing robot: a three-module robot for automatic wall inspection

The system proposed in this article is the Alicia/sup 3/ climbing robot. The aim of this project is to develop a system that can be adopted in a variety of applications, such as maintenance, building, inspection, and safety in the process and construction industries. The system could be adopted in many places where direct access by a human operator is very expensive because of the need for scaffolding or is very dangerous due to the presence of a hostile environment.

A modular approach for the design of the Alicia3 climbing robot for industrial inspection

The system proposed in this paper is the Alicia3 robot, which is based on the Alicia II module. Its aim is to inspect non‐porous vertical walls like those of aboveground petrochemical tanks, with a wide range of surface materials and cleanliness levels. To meet this aim, pneumatic‐like adhesion has been selected for the system. The system is also required to move over the surface at a suitable speed, to pass over obstacles and to have a suitable payload to carry mission‐specific instrumentation. The robot design mainly aimed at finding a solution with a high degree of modularity, so that it can easily be disassembled for maintenance purposes and to replace consumable parts such as the wheels and the sealing, making its design easier. Some onboard control algorithms have also been introduced to increase system reliability and reduce energy consumption.

ROBOVOLC: a robot for volcano exploration result of first test campaign

ROBOVOLC is a new robotic system that has been designed to help scientists in the exploration of volcanoes. It is composed of three subsystems: a rover platform with six articulated and independently actuated wheels; a manipulator arm to collect rock samples, drop and pick up sensors and sample gas; and a pan‐tilt turret with a high resolution camera, video‐camera, infrared camera and a doppler radar for gas speed measurement. This paper contains a short description of the system, following an introduction to the problem and review of the state‐of‐the‐art. Finally, results from the first test campaign on Mount Etna during September 2002 are briefly described.

An Overview of the Volcan Project: An UAS for Exploration of Volcanic Environments

This paper presents an overview of the Volcan Project, whose goal is the realization of an autonomous aerial system able to perform aerial surveillance of volcanic areas and to analyze the composition of gases inside volcanic plumes. There are increasing experimental evidences that measuring the chemical composition of volcanic gases can contribute to forecast volcanic eruptions. However, in situ gas sampling is a difficult operation and often exposes scientists to significant risks. At this aim, an Unmanned Aircraft System equipped with remote sensing technologies, able to sense the plume in the proximity of the crater, has been developed. In this paper, the aerial platform will be presented, together with the problems related to the flight in a hard scenario like the volcanic one and the tests performed with the aim of finding the right configuration for the vehicle. The developed autonomous navigation system and the sensors unit for gas analysis will be introduced; at the end, several experimental results will be described.

Volcanic Environments: Robots for Exploration and Measurement

The study of volcanic activity is important from a scientific point of view as it allows for a better understanding of one of the most spectacular geological phenomena and of the working principles that are at the basis of geophysics. Furthermore, there are numerous events that directly result from volcanic eruptions and that affect many populations. Therefore, improving the prediction methods of eruptive phenomena would be of great benefit. There are more than 1,500 potentially active volcanoes in the world, and roughly 10% of the worlds population live in areas directly threatened by volcanoes. In all of these areas, volcanoes have a strong influence on many day-to-day activities. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland in April 2010 caused the cancellation of more than 100,000 European flights and, consequently, left more than 10 million passengers stranded. Each year, on a graver note, many regions in the world are destroyed or heavily damaged by lava or pyroclastic flows, in some cases, resulting in numbers of casualties that could have been avoided with the improvement of early warning systems.

HIL Tuning of UAV for Exploration of Risky Environments

In this paper the latest results of an HIL architecture, optimized to develop and test UAV platforms are presented. This architecture has been used to realize the different devices involved in the navigation and stability control of the Volcan UAV, a plane designed to operate in volcanic environments. The proposed architecture is strongly modular and flexible and allows the development of avionic hardware and software, testing and tuning the involved algorithms with non-destructive trials. A flight simulator (X-Plane) with a suitable plane model and plug-in, has been adopted to simulate the UAV dynamics. The flight simulator, interfaced with the real electronic boards, allows an easy tuning of all the control parameters and data collecting for test and validation. The effectiveness of adopted methodology was confirmed by several flight tests performed subsequently by using the designed avionic modules on the real UAV.

SCID - a non-actuated robot for walls exploration

In this paper a control methodology applied to a passive mechanical system is described. The sliding climbing inspection device (SCID) has been designed to slide down over a ferromagnetic vertical surface, using two electromagnets. The on-board electronics and the control algorithm used allow the system to control its velocity and trajectory. The system was experimentally tested and a simplified mathematical model was computed.

“Hardware in the Loop” Tuning for a Volcanic Gas Sampling UAV

Significant advances have been made in recent years in volcanic eruption forecasting and in understanding the behaviour of volcanoes. A major requirement is improvement in the collection of field data using innovative methodologies and sensors. Collected data are typically used as input for computer simulations of volcanic activity, to improve forecasts for longlived volcanic phenomena, such as lava flow eruptions and sand-rain.

Design and Simulation of Two Robotic Systems for Automatic Artichoke Harvesting

The target of this research project was a feasibility study for the development of a robot for automatic or semi-automatic artichoke harvesting. During this project, different solutions for the mechanical parts of the machine, its control system and the harvesting tools were investigated. Moreover, in cooperation with the department DISPA of University of Catania, different field structures with different kinds of artichoke cultivars were studied and tested. The results of this research could improve artichoke production for preserves industries. As a first step, an investigation on existing machines has been done. From this research, it has been shown that very few machines exist for this purpose. Based also on previous experiences, some proposals for different robotic systems have been done, while the mobile platform itself was developed within another research project. At the current stage, several different configurations of machines and harvesting end-effectors have been designed and simulated using a 3D CAD environment interfaced with Matlab®. Moreover, as support for one of the proposed machines, an artificial vision algorithm has been developed in order to locate the artichokes on the plant, with respect to the robot, using images taken with a standard webcam.

A Direction Dependent Parametric Model for the Vacuum Adhesion System of the Alicia II Robot

In this work, some parametric nonlinear dynamic models for the pneumatic adhesion subsystem of the climbing robot Alicia II have been computed. The structures of the used models rely on the real system physics and on some heuristic considerations. The former allowed to classify the system as direction dependent; the latter allowed to compensate the models for some other kind of nonlinearities. The proposed models can be useful to implement and tune a control algorithm for the pressure inside the pneumatic adhesion cup of the robot, in order to prevent it from falling down