Eduardo Pinto

An autonomous surface-aerial marsupial robotic team for riverine environmental monitoring: Benefiting from coordinated aerial, underwater, and surface level perception

This paper presents RIVERWATCH, an autonomous surface-aerial marsupial robotic team for riverine environmental monitoring. The robotic system is composed of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) piggybacking a multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. The ASV provides the team with longrange transportation in all-weather conditions, whereas the UAV assures an augmented perception of the environment. The coordinated aerial, underwater, and surface level perception allows the team to assess navigation cost from the near field to the far field, which is key for safe navigation and environmental monitoring data gathering. The robotic system is validated on a set of field trials.

On the Design of a Robotic System Composed of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle and a Piggybacked VTOL

This paper presents the core ideas of the RIVERWATCH experiment and describes its hardware architecture. The RIVERWATCH experiment considers the use of autonomous surface vehicles piggybacking multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles for the automatic monitoring of riverine environments. While the surface vehicle benefits from the aerial vehicle to extend its field of view, the aerial vehicle benefits from the surface vehicle to ensure long-range mobility. This symbiotic relation between both robots is expected to enhance the robustness and long lasting of the ensemble. The hardware architecture includes a considerable set of state-of-the-art sensory modalities and it is abstracted from the perception and navigation algorithms by using the Robotics Operating System (ROS). A set of field trials shows the ability of the prototype to scan a closed water body. The datasets obtained from the field trials are freely available to the robotics community.

A cooperative multi-robot team for the surveillance of shipwreck survivors at sea

The sea as a very extensive area, renders difficult a pre-emptive and long-lasting search for shipwreck survivors. The operational cost for deploying manned teams with such proactive strategy is high and, thus, these teams are only reactively deployed when a disaster like a shipwreck has been communicated. To reduce the involved financial costs, unmanned robotic systems could be used instead as background surveillance teams patrolling the seas. In this sense, a robotic team for search and rescue (SAR) operations at sea is presented in this work. Composed of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) piggybacking a watertight Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with vertical take-off and landing capabilities, the proposed cooperative system is capable of search, track and provide basic life support while reporting the position of human survivors to better prepared manned rescue teams. The USV provides long-range transportation of the UAV and basic survival kits for victims. The UAV assures an augmented perception of the environment due to its high vantage point.

Online self-reconfigurable robot navigation in heterogeneous environments

This paper presents a robot navigation system capable of online self-reconfiguration according to the needs imposed by the various contexts present in heterogeneous environments. The ability to cope with heterogeneous environments is key for a robust deployment of service robots in truly demanding scenarios. In the proposed system, flexibility is present at the several layers composing the robots navigation system. At the lowest layer, proper locomotion modes are selected according to the environments local context. At the highest layer, proper motion and path planning strategies are selected according to the environments global context. While local context is obtained directly from the robots sensory input, global context is inspected from semantic labels registered off-line on geo-referenced maps. The proposed system leverages on the well-known Robotics Operating System (ROS) framework for the implementation of the major navigation system components. The system was successfully validated over approximately 1 Km long experiments on INTROBOT, an all-terrain industrial-grade robot equipped with four independently steered wheels.

On Collaborative Aerial and Surface Robots for Environmental Monitoring of Water Bodies

Remote monitoring is an essential task to help maintaining Earth ecosystems. A notorious example is the monitoring of riverine environments. The solution purposed in this paper is to use an electric boat (ASV - Autonomous Surface Vehicle) operating in symbiosis with a quadrotor (UAV – Unmanned Air Vehicle). We present the architecture and solutions adopted and at the same time compare it with other examples of collaborative robotics systems, in what we expected could be used as a survey for other persons doing collaborative robotics systems. The architecture here purposed will exploit the symbiotic partnership between both robots by covering the perception, navigation, coordination, and integration aspects.

Sediment Sampling in Estuarine Mudflats with an Aerial-Ground Robotic Team

This paper presents a robotic team suited for bottom sediment sampling and retrieval in mudflats, targeting environmental monitoring tasks. The robotic team encompasses a four-wheel-steering ground vehicle, equipped with a drilling tool designed to be able to retain wet soil, and a multi-rotor aerial vehicle for dynamic aerial imagery acquisition. On-demand aerial imagery, properly fused on an aerial mosaic, is used by remote human operators for specifying the robotic mission and supervising its execution. This is crucial for the success of an environmental monitoring study, as often it depends on human expertise to ensure the statistical significance and accuracy of the sampling procedures. Although the literature is rich on environmental monitoring sampling procedures, in mudflats, there is a gap as regards including robotic elements. This paper closes this gap by also proposing a preliminary experimental protocol tailored to exploit the capabilities offered by the robotic system. Field trials in the south bank of the river Tagus’ estuary show the ability of the robotic system to successfully extract and transport bottom sediment samples for offline analysis. The results also show the efficiency of the extraction and the benefits when compared to (conventional) human-based sampling.

An Aerial-Ground Robotic Team for Systematic Soil and Biota Sampling in Estuarine Mudflats

This paper presents an aerial-ground field robotic team, designed to collect and transport soil and biota samples in estuarine mudflats. The robotic system has been devised so that its sampling and storage capabilities are suited for radionuclides and heavy metals environmental monitoring. Automating these time-consuming and physically demanding tasks is expected to positively impact both their scope and frequency. The success of an environmental monitoring study heavily depends on the statistical significance and accuracy of the sampling procedures, which most often require frequent human intervention. The bird’s-eye view provided by the aerial vehicle aims at supporting remote mission specification and execution monitoring. This paper also proposes a preliminary experimental protocol tailored to exploit the capabilities offered by the robotic system. Preliminary field trials in real estuarine mudflats show the ability of the robotic system to successfully extract and transport soil samples for offline analysis.

A Health and Usage Monitoring System for ROS-based service robots

This paper presents a multi-core processing solution for ROS-based service robots. The power management together with the control and availability of the processing resources are supervised by a custom-made Power Management Board (PMB) based on a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) micro controller, implementing a Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS). The proposed architecture also allows for the PMB to control the most critical robot functions in case of low battery conditions or impossibility of performing energy harvesting, thus extending the lifespan of the robot. All PMB data is recorded on a SD card so as to allow offline analyses of the robotic mission and, thus, support subsequent maintenance activities. Two different implementations of the proposed system have been fielded in two Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) for environmental monitoring, covering aerial, water surface, and wheeled ground vehicles. An additional implementation of the architecture is currently being deployed on an industrial autonomous logistics robot. These three implementations are presented and discussed.

On the design of the ROBO-PARTNER Intra-factory logistics autonomous robot

The trends of manufacturing have now begun to call for a more adaptive and dynamic shop floor in the automation industry. The advancements in mobile robotics of recent decades have inspired and cemented a belief that multiple autonomous mobile robotic agents, often cooperatively sharing the workspace with humans, will significantly contribute to a truly flexible shop floor of the future. This article reports on the design specifications for one such robotic agent, the Intra-factory Mobile Assistant Unit (IMAU), able to carry material boxes between supermarkets and assembly stations, dynamically avoiding obstacles, throughout the shop floor. The solution will make shop floor logistics more flexible, reduce the allocated space for buffers, and, also, ease the human workload. The article will cover the sensing, actuation, communication, software architecture, and the seamless integration into the plants execution system, which shape the autonomous logistics robot to be deployed into a working automotive shop floor during the ROBO-PARTNER project.

A symbiotic lenticular airship for WiSAR missions

This paper presents and describes an innovative cooperative symbiotic robotic system based in two types of unmanned air vehicles: A lenticular shaped airship that allows 3D omnidirectional movements with a big top area for solar energy harvesting and a group of micro-quad rotors using micro electric ducted fans. The solution presented could be used in missions as environmental, biodiversity monitoring, WiSAR missions, road monitoring, detection of forest fires, etc.