Plant inspection by using a ground vehicle and an aerial robot: lessons learned from plant disaster prevention challenge in world robot summit 2018

Articulating Resilience: Adaptive Locomotion of Wheeled Tensegrity Robot

Resilience plays an important role in improving robustness for robots in harsh environments such as planetary exploration and unstructured terrains. As a naturally compliant structure, tensegrity presents advantageous flexibility for enhancing resilience in robotic applications according to existing research. However, tensegrity robots to date are normally based on monolithic morphologies and are slow in locomotion. In this paper, we demonstrate how we adopt such flexibility to improve the robustness of wheeled robots by articulating modules with tensegrity mechanisms. The test results reveal the robot is resistant and resilient to external hazards in a fully passive manner owing to the continuous elasticity in the structure network. It possesses a good number of DoFs and can adapt to various terrains easily either with actuation or not. The robot is also capable of crawling locomotion aside from wheeled locomotion to traverse uneven surfaces and provide self-recovery from rollovers. It demonstrates good robustness and mobility at the same time compared with existing tensegrity robots and shows the competitiveness with conventional rigid robots in harsh scenarios. The proposed robot presents the capability of tensegrity robots with resilience, robustness, agility, and mobility without compromise. In a broader perspective, it widens the potential of tensegrity robots in practical applications.

An assessment of contamination pickup on ground robotic vehicles for nuclear surveying application

Ground robotic vehicles are often deployed to inspect areas where radioactive floor contamination is a prominent risk. However, the accuracy of detection could be adversely affected by enhanced radiation signal through self-contamination of the robot occurring over the course of the inspection. In this work, it was hypothesised that a six-legged robot could offer advantages over the more conventional ground robotic devices such as wheeled and tracked rovers. To investigate this, experimental contamination testing and computational Monte Carlo simulation techniques (GEANT4) were employed to understand how radioactive contamination pick-up on three different robotic vehicles would affect their detection accuracy. Two robotic vehicles were selected for comparison with the hexapod robot based on their type of locomotion; a wheeled rover and a tracked rover. With the aid of a non-toxic fluorescent tracer dust, the contamination received by the all three vehicles when traversing a contaminated area was initially compared through physical inspection using high definition cameras. The parametric results from these tests where used in the computational study carried out in GEANT4. A cadmium zinc telluride detector was simulated at heights ranging from 10 to 50 cm above each contaminated vehicle, as if it were mounted on a plinth. Assuming a uniform activity of 60 Bq cm^-2on all contaminated surfaces, the results suggested that due to the hexapod's small ground-contacting surface area and geometry, radiation detection rates using an uncollimated detector are likely to be overestimated by between only 0.07%-0.12%, compared with 3.95%-8.43% and 1.75%-14.53% for the wheeled and tracked robot alternatives, respectively.