This paper describes the design, construction and validation of a mobile sensory platform for greenhouse monitoring. The complete system consists of a sensory system on board a small quadrotor (i.e., ...a four rotor mini-UAV). The goals of this system include taking measures of temperature, humidity, luminosity and CO2 concentration and plotting maps of these variables. These features could potentially allow for climate control, crop monitoring or failure detection (e.g., a break in a plastic cover). The sensors have been selected by considering the climate and plant growth models and the requirements for their integration onboard the quadrotor. The sensors layout and placement have been determined through a study of quadrotor aerodynamics and the influence of the airflows from its rotors. All components of the system have been developed, integrated and tested through a set of field experiments in a real greenhouse. The primary contributions of this paper are the validation of the quadrotor as a platform for measuring environmental variables and the determination of the optimal location of sensors on a quadrotor.
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The productivity of greenhouses highly depends on the environmental conditions of crops, such as temperature and humidity. The control and monitoring might need large sensor networks, and as a ...consequence, mobile sensory systems might be a more suitable solution. This paper describes the application of a heterogeneous robot team to monitor environmental variables of greenhouses. The multi-robot system includes both ground and aerial vehicles, looking to provide flexibility and improve performance. The multi-robot sensory system measures the temperature, humidity, luminosity and carbon dioxide concentration in the ground and at different heights. Nevertheless, these measurements can be complemented with other ones (e.g., the concentration of various gases or images of crops) without a considerable effort. Additionally, this work addresses some relevant challenges of multi-robot sensory systems, such as the mission planning and task allocation, the guidance, navigation and control of robots in greenhouses and the coordination among ground and aerial vehicles. This work has an eminently practical approach, and therefore, the system has been extensively tested both in simulations and field experiments.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue entitled “Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends, and Applications” that was published in Applied Sciences. This Special Issue collected seventeen ...high-quality papers that discuss the main challenges of multi-robot systems, present the trends to address these issues, and report various relevant applications. Some of the topics addressed by these papers are robot swarms, mission planning, robot teaming, machine learning, immersive technologies, search and rescue, and social robotics.
Intervention teams act in hostile scenarios where reducing mission times and accident risks is critical. In these situations, the availability of accurate information about the environment plays a ...key role in ensuring the well‐being of rescuers and victims. This information required to plan the interventions in indoor emergencies encompasses the location of fires and the presence of dangerous gases. Robotics and remote sensing technologies can help emergency teams to obtain this information in real‐time without exposing themselves. Additionally, the accurate simulation of the environments allows the teams to plan their interventions, creating routes to safely access the affected areas and evacuate the victims. This article presents a robotic solution developed to satisfy the demands of intervention teams. More specifically, it describes an autonomous ground robot that can obtain real‐time location and environmental data from indoor fires, as well as a simulator that reproduces these emergency scenarios and facilitates mission planning. In this way, emergency teams can know the conditions in the scenario before, during, and after the intervention. Thus, risks are minimized by improving their situational awareness and reducing their exposure times during the mission. The system has been developed and validated in collaboration with the end‐users and under realistic harsh environments. During these experiments, the robot was used to detect fire sources and cold smoke and provide environmental information to firefighters. Additionally, the simulator provided alternative routes for accessing and exiting the scene faster and safer by dodging potentially dangerous areas.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Forest firefighting missions encompass multiple tasks related to prevention, surveillance, and extinguishing. This work presents a complete survey of firefighters on the current problems in their ...work and the potential technological solutions. Additionally, it reviews the efforts performed by the academy and industry to apply different types of robots in the context of firefighting missions. Finally, all this information is used to propose a concept of operation for the comprehensive application of drone swarms in firefighting. The proposed system is a fleet of quadcopters that individually are only able to visit waypoints and use payloads, but collectively can perform tasks of surveillance, mapping, monitoring, etc. Three operator roles are defined, each one with different access to information and functions in the mission: mission commander, team leaders, and team members. These operators take advantage of virtual and augmented reality interfaces to intuitively get the information of the scenario and, in the case of the mission commander, control the drone swarm.
Multi-robot missions are a challenge for operators in terms of workload and situational awareness. These operators have to receive data from the robots, extract information, understand the situation ...properly, make decisions, generate the adequate commands, and send them to the robots. The consequences of excessive workload and lack of awareness can vary from inefficiencies to accidents. This work focuses on the study of future operator interfaces of multi-robot systems, taking into account relevant issues such as multimodal interactions, immersive devices, predictive capabilities and adaptive displays. Specifically, four interfaces have been designed and developed: a conventional, a predictive conventional, a virtual reality and a predictive virtual reality interface. The four interfaces have been validated by the performance of twenty-four operators that supervised eight multi-robot missions of fire surveillance and extinguishing. The results of the workload and situational awareness tests show that virtual reality improves the situational awareness without increasing the workload of operators, whereas the effects of predictive components are not significant and depend on their implementation.
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Smart cities have emerged as a strategy to solve problems that current cities face, such as traffic, security, resource management, waste, and pollution. Most of the current approaches are based on ...deploying large numbers of sensors throughout the city and have some limitations to get relevant and updated data. In this paper, as an extension of our previous investigations, we propose a robotic swarm to collect the data of traffic, pedestrians, climate, and pollution. This data is sent to a base station, where it is treated to generate maps and presented in an immersive interface. To validate these developments, we use a virtual city called SwarmCity with models of traffic, pedestrians, climate, and pollution based on real data. The whole system has been tested with several subjects to assess whether the information collected by the drones, processed in the base station, and represented in the virtual reality interface is appropriate. Results show that the complete solution, i.e., fleet control, data fusion, and operator interface, allows monitoring the relevant variables in the simulated city.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Revealing the active nature of oxide-derived copper is of key importance to understand its remarkable catalytic performance during the cathodic CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) to produce valuable ...hydrocarbons. Using advanced spectroscopy, electron microscopy, and electrochemically active surface area characterization techniques, the electronic structure and the changes in the morphology/roughness of thermally oxidized copper thin films were revealed during CO2RR. For this purpose, we developed an in situ cell for X-ray spectroscopy that could be operated accurately in the presence of gases or liquids to clarify the role of the initial thermal oxide phase and its active phase during the electrocatalytic reduction of CO2. It was found that the Cu(I) species formed during the thermal treatment are readily reduced to Cu0 during the CO2RR, whereas Cu(II) species are hardly reduced. In addition, Cu(II) oxide electrode dissolution was found to yield a porous/void structure, where the lack of electrical connection between isolated islands prohibits the CO2RR. Therefore, the active/stable phase for CO2RR is metallic copper, independent of its initial phase, with a significant change in its morphology upon its reduction yielding the formation of a rougher surface with a higher number of underco-ordinated sites. Thus, the initial thermal oxidation of copper in air controls the reaction activity/selectivity because of the changes induced in the electrode surface morphology/roughness and the presence of more undercoordinated sites during the CO2RR.
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Multi-robot missions can be compared to industrial processes or public services in terms of complexity, agents and interactions. Process mining is an emerging discipline that involves process ...modeling, analysis and improvement through the information collected by event logs. Currently, this discipline is successfully used to analyze several types of processes, but is hardly applied in the context of robotics. This work proposes a systematic protocol for the application of process mining to analyze and improve multi-robot missions. As an example, this protocol is applied to a scenario of fire surveillance and extinguishing with a fleet of UAVs. The results show the potential of process mining in the analysis of multi-robot missions and the detection of problems such as bottlenecks and inefficiencies. This work opens the way to an extensive use of these techniques in multi-robot missions, allowing the development of future systems for optimizing missions, allocating tasks to robots, detecting anomalies or supporting operator decisions.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OBVAL, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
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