scholarly journals Falcon: A False Ceiling Inspection Robot

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5281
Author(s):  
M. A. Viraj J. Muthugala ◽  
Koppaka Ganesh Sai Apuroop ◽  
Saurav Ghante Anantha Padmanabha ◽  
S. M. Bhagya P. Samarakoon ◽  
Mohan Rajesh Elara ◽  
...  

Frequent inspections are essential for false ceilings to maintain the service infrastructures, such as mechanical, electrical, and plumbing, and the structure of false ceilings. Human-labor-based conventional inspection procedures for false ceilings suffer many shortcomings, including safety concerns. Thus, robot-aided solutions are demanded for false ceiling inspections similar to other building maintenance services. However, less work has been conducted on developing robot-aided solutions for false ceiling inspections. This paper proposes a novel design for a robot intended for false ceiling inspections named Falcon. The compact size and the tracked wheel design of the robot allow it to traverse obstacles such as runners and lighting fixtures. The robot’s ability to autonomously follow the perimeter of a false ceiling can improve the productivity of the inspection process since the heading of the robot often changes due to the nature of the terrain, and continuous heading correction is an overhead for a teleoperator. Therefore, a Perimeter-Following Controller (PFC) based on fuzzy logic was integrated into the robot. Experimental results obtained by deploying a prototype of the robot design to a false ceiling testbed confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed PFC in perimeter following and the robot’s features, such as the ability to traverse on runners and fixtures in a false ceiling.

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (17) ◽  
pp. 5742
Author(s):  
M. A. Viraj J. Muthugala ◽  
Povendhan Palanisamy ◽  
S. M. Bhagya P. Samarakoon ◽  
Saurav Ghante Anantha Padmanabha ◽  
Mohan Rajesh Elara ◽  
...  

Frequent inspections are essential for drains to maintain proper function to ensure public health and safety. Robots have been developed to aid the drain inspection process. However, existing robots designed for drain inspection require improvements in their design and autonomy. This paper proposes a novel design of a drain inspection robot named Raptor. The robot has been designed with a manually reconfigurable wheel axle mechanism, which allows the change of ground clearance height. Design aspects of the robot, such as mechanical design, control architecture and autonomy functions, are comprehensively described in the paper, and insights are included. Maintaining the robot’s position in the middle of a drain when moving along the drain is essential for the inspection process. Thus, a fuzzy logic controller has been introduced to the robot to cater to this demand. Experiments have been conducted by deploying a prototype of the design to drain environments considering a set of diverse test scenarios. Experiment results show that the proposed controller effectively maintains the robot in the middle of a drain while moving along the drain. Therefore, the proposed robot design and the controller would be helpful in improving the productivity of robot-aided inspection of drains.


Author(s):  
Payman Joudzadeh ◽  
Alireza Hadi ◽  
Bahram Tarvirdizadeh ◽  
Danial Borooghani ◽  
Khalil Alipour

Purpose This paper aims to deal with the development of a novel lower limb exoskeleton to assist disabled people in stair ascending. Design/methodology/approach For this purpose, a novel design of a mixture of motors and cables has been proposed for users to wear them easily and show the application of the system in stair climbing. Findings One of the prominences of this study is the provided robot design where four joints are actuated with only two motors; each motor actuates either the knees or ankles. Another advantage of the designed system is that with motors placed in a backpack, the knee braces can be worn under clothes to be concealed. Finally, the system performance is evaluated using electromyography (EMG) signals showing 28 per cent reduction in energy consumption of related muscles. Originality/value This investigation deals with the development of a novel lower limb exoskeleton to assist disabled people in stair ascending.


Author(s):  
A H Majeed ◽  
K H Sayidmarie

<p class="Default">In this paper, a new approach to the design of an UWB monopole antenna with dual band-notched characteristics is presented.   The antenna has the form of an elliptical monopole over a ground plane having an elliptical slot to achieve the UWB. The dual-band notch function is created by inserting a U-shaped and a C-shaped slots on the radiating patch, thus no extra size is needed. The proposed antenna shows a good omnidirectional radiation pattern across the band from 3.2 to more than 14 GHz. The dual band-rejection is for 4.88-5.79GHz centered at 5.4GHz and 7.21-8.46 GHz centered at 7.8 GHz. The antenna prototype using the FR-4 substrate with ε<sub>r</sub>=4.3 has a compact size of 25mm×25 mm ×1.45mm. The fabricated prototype showed experimental results comparable to those obtained from the simulations.</p>


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Songpo Li ◽  
Xiaoli Zhang ◽  
Fernando J. Kim ◽  
Rodrigo Donalisio da Silva ◽  
Diedra Gustafson ◽  
...  

Laparoscopic robots have been widely adopted in modern medical practice. However, explicitly interacting with these robots may increase the physical and cognitive load on the surgeon. An attention-aware robotic laparoscope system has been developed to free the surgeon from the technical limitations of visualization through the laparoscope. This system can implicitly recognize the surgeon's visual attention by interpreting the surgeon's natural eye movements using fuzzy logic and then automatically steer the laparoscope to focus on that viewing target. Experimental results show that this system can make the surgeon–robot interaction more effective, intuitive, and has the potential to make the execution of the surgery smoother and faster.


Author(s):  
Johnathon Garcia ◽  
Kooktae Lee

Abstract In this paper, a novel snake like robot design is presented and analyzed. The structure described desires to obtain a robot that is most like a snake found in nature. This is achieved with the combination of both rigid and soft link structures by implementing a 3D printed rigid link and a soft cast silicone skin. The proposed structure serves to have a few mechanical improvements while maintaining the positives of previous designs. The implementation of the silicone skin presents the opportunity to use synthetic scales and directional friction. The design modifications of this novel design are analyzed on the fronts of the kinematics and minimizing power loss. Minimization of power loss is done through a numerical minimization of three separate parameters with the smallest positive power loss being used. This results in the minimal power loss per unit distance. This research found that the novel structure presented can be effectively described and modeled, such that they could be applied to a constructed model.


Mathematics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 1254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheng-Hung Chen ◽  
Shiou-Yun Jeng ◽  
Cheng-Jian Lin

In this study, a fuzzy logic controller with the reinforcement improved differential search algorithm (FLC_R-IDS) is proposed for solving a mobile robot wall-following control problem. This study uses the reward and punishment mechanisms of reinforcement learning to train the mobile robot wall-following control. The proposed improved differential search algorithm uses parameter adaptation to adjust the control parameters. To improve the exploration of the algorithm, a change in the number of superorganisms is required as it involves a stopover site. This study uses reinforcement learning to guide the behavior of the robot. When the mobile robot satisfies three reward conditions, it gets reward +1. The accumulated reward value is used to evaluate the controller and to replace the next controller training. Experimental results show that, compared with the traditional differential search algorithm and the chaos differential search algorithm, the average error value of the proposed FLC_R-IDS in the three experimental environments is reduced by 12.44%, 22.54% and 25.98%, respectively. Final, the experimental results also show that the real mobile robot using the proposed method can effectively implement the wall-following control.


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