The Software/Hardware And Navigation Algorithm Of Intelligent Robot For Inshore Monitoring

Intelligent Robots are, or soon will be, used in such critical domains as search and rescue, military battle, mine and bomb detection, scientific exploration, law enforcement, and hospital care. They are more than a tool, but assistants in our life and partners in our work. They are playing a more and more important role in our daily life. Environment becomes a global issue now. Experiment data is used to tell whether an environment is polluted or what the degree of the pollution is. The data is easy to get in normal environment such as farm. However, it's really a hard work to get data in abominable environment in a large scope. The second generation robot is not able to work in such environment, nor is a monitoring ship. That's why the third generation monitoring robot comes out.The system introduced in this paper is based on the requirement, which is introduced in the previous paragraph. This paper introduces the hardware and software of the intelligent inshore monitoring robot -"Off-Shore"as well as the navigation system."Off-Shore"implements the functionality of Self Collision preventing, Self Navigation, Fault and Alarm, Self Rescue etc.. However, the operators in the workstation have higher priority over the control the robot, so that the system could handle emergency.Hardware of"Off-Shore"includes Central Control System, Monitoring System, Navigation System, Collision-Preventing System, Imaging System, Driving System, Power System and Telecommunication System. Sonar is used to get the depth information of the district we are monitoring. The Vision System will send back image information around the robot, so that a map of the monitoring district could be created. A detailed introduction of the hardware is given in the second part of this paper.Software of"Off-Shore"covers Operating System, Drivers and Applications. Operating System for the robot is Linux. Linux OS could be deployed according to requirement. Drivers are a bridge, which bring the software and hardware together. Applications include server applications and client applications, while client applications cover every subsystem application. A detailed introduction of software is introduced in the third part of this paper.A base for intelligent robot is self navigation. Navigation is very important in robot design. There are many navigation systems, such as DR (DEAD RECKONING), INS (Inertial Navigation System), GPS, Signpost Navigation, SLAM, Vision-Based Navigation System, Taste-Based Navigation System etc.. The navigation system of"Off-Shore"is a combined navigation system GPS/DR base on improved UPF (Unscented Particle Filter) algorithm. Detailed information about the navigation system is introduced in the fourth part of this paper. The results of experiment for this algorithm are also shown in this section.The author of this paper takes part in selection of equipment, design of hardware, upgrade of Linux kernel, development of some drivers and coding for serial applications. UPF is introduced in this paper. An improved UPF is brought up, and the algorithm is used in"Off-Shore"navigation system.