Research And Development Of Mobile Robot Platform For Hazard Materials Detection

Mobile robot for hazard materials detection can be dispatched to scout accident spots, such as the place polluted by the hazardous chemical materials, insteading of human personnel be exposed directly to the unknown situation, or hazardous area. It may reduce the danger, and improve efficiency by sending the robot to detect, sample, and dispose the toxicant material. In the reasearch and development of mobile robot platform for hazard metarial detection, the motion control system, sensor system, as well as of operator controller are developmed.Firstly, the functional requirements of mobile robot platform of hazardous materials detection are analyzed. And a four-wheel vehicle which is able move on rugged terrain is chosen as the mobile platform. Then, a layered hardware structure of electronic system is designed. And a hybrid mobile robot architecture which combined the key features of hierarchical and behavior-based architecture is introduced.The design and implementation of mobile robot's motion control system is described in succession. The motion control system controls the robot to move or to turn. And the translation velocity is controlled with the algorithm of fuzzy PID.The mobile robot flatform for hazard materials detection needs measuring it own location, posture, translation speed, and itself status, as well as sensing surroundings while it works in accident events. The sensor system for the mobile robot is implemented. It is composed of ranging system, incline sensor module, and GPS module. The ranging system has three modules, ultrasonic ranging module, infrared ranging module, and data fusion module. The ranging system calculate the reliable distances between the robot and the obstacles around by fusing the multiple sensor data of ultrasonic and infrared with adaptive weighted fusion algorithm. It meets the need of avoiding obstacle of mobile robot autonomous navigation. The incline sensor module is able to measure the roll and tilt angles of the mobile platform. The GPS module gives the latitude, longitude, and altitude of the robot location.An operator controller for human-robot interaction is developed according to the functional requirements of remote control. It includs of analog command input panel and a notebook computer. The operator controller possessed a few advantages, including of convenient command input,visualized display, and friendly interactive.Finally, the experiments of the mobile robot platform is described. The experimental results show the mobile robot platform meets the demands of hazard metarials detection. It is able to run on the rugged terrains, and feedback the live video of accident spot, sensors data, and itself pose, etc. Other measurement or analysis instrument may also be integrated to the mobile robot platform easily.