A Mobile Robot Combination Autonomous Behavior Strategy Inspects Hazardous Gases in Relatively Narrow Man-Machine environment

Abstract

Compared with the public inspection places like airports, squares, and waiting halls, places such as laboratories, warehouses are generally relatively narrow, and humans may suddenly appear in the passages. Once a hazardous or toxic gas leak occurs in such spaces, it will cause a wide range of casualties and immeasurable economic losses. To ensure the safety of personal and property, realize real-time monitoring in unattended or dangerous situations, a robot moving mechanism with an effective and practical autonomous behavior strategy is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a mobile robot equipped with a hazardous gases detector and a high-definition (HD) industrial camera is designed, which can be controlled remotely or work autonomously. Next, a fixed-point and a fixed-trajectory method is adopted to avoidance: establish the social force model; study the human's (interfering object's) typical behavior patterns; based on Fuzzy thinking, a dynamic obstacle avoidance strategy is presented, and combine the dynamic obstacle avoidance strategy, a combination autonomous behavior strategy with a Fuzzy-PID controller is proposed. Finally, the crossing pattern and encountering pattern simulations and experiments results show that the robot can realize the dynamic obstacle avoidance in a relatively narrow man-machine environment smoothly and always maintain a sufficient safety distance to reduce the "sense of crisis" humans towards the robot. The trajectory experiments in such spaces verify that when the robot deviates from the predetermined position during inspection operations, the combination autonomous behavior strategy can help the robot return to the target trajectory. Furthermore, compared with the PID control method, the robot position error up to 0.098m, the angle error up to 0.088rad, the Fuzzy-PID controller is more stable, accurate, and fast, which draws the stability and reliability of the strategy.