Sensorized robotic sphere for large exterior critical infrastructures supervision

Abstract

Abstract. The surveillance and inspection tasks in large exterior critical infrastructures have arisen as critical processes. More complex challenges are now present, and the traditional approaches are sometimes obsolete for facing these new menaces. An alternative system-a mobile sensor, spherical shaped-that provides a flexible, versatile, and reliable way to perform measurements is proposed. Even more, thanks to its original traction method (based on center of gravity destabilization), the system has a result as an all-terrain vehicle that guarantees a safe and friendly interaction with the environment. It has been widely tested, verifying as well the accurate acquisition performance, resulting in this system as a suitable sensing and monitoring alternative.

Science and Technology Parks: A Futuristic Approach

“…Moreover, the autonomous robots designed for picking fruits may have different types of end-effectors, e.g., electric gripper, pneumatic gripper, suction cups [70], gecko gripper, origami flower gripper, fruit picker, trash fingers [71] and other robotic tools, depending upon the shape and size of the fruit, bins, or nature of the task. Similarly, to compensate for the terrain-specific limitations of wheeled robots, spherical robots can also be used in all-terrain types for exploration [72], surveillance [73], and measuring soil temperature and moisture for precise agriculture [74]. Hence, some of the tasks that can be performed explicitly by ground-based autonomous agricultural robots include:…”

Kinematics of Spherical Robots Rolling over 3D Terrains

“…In fact, while several researches have been done on 3D kinematics of other types of mobile robots such as legged [14] and wheeled robots [15,16], to the best of the authors' knowledge, the general problem of kinematics of SRs rolling on 3D terrains has not been investigated in the literature. The motivation to address this problem is that, while many applications of the SRs are on flat surfaces such as indoor [17], and paved roads [18], for a variety of applications such as agriculture [19], surveillance [20],…”

“…In fact, while several researches have been done on 3D kinematics of other types of mobile robots such as legged [14] and wheeled robots [15,16], to the best of the authors' knowledge, the general problem of kinematics of SRs rolling on 3D terrains has not been investigated in the literature. The motivation to address this problem is that, while many applications of the SRs are on flat surfaces such as indoor [17], and paved roads [18], for a variety of applications such as agriculture [19], surveillance [20], environmental monitoring [21], and even planetary explorations [22], they would get exposed to uneven terrains.In this work, prior to deriving the kinematics of SRs on 3D terrains, a general method for modeling a geometrical sphere rolling over a mathematically known 3D surface is developed. Then, the derived equations are expanded in order to be applied to SRs considering their specifications.…”

Robots in Agriculture: State of Art and Practical Experiences

“…This type of robots is used in several applications and scenarios, such as exploration [93] and surveillance [94]. ROSPHERE is described by their authors as a new low-cost spherical robot for measuring soil temperature and moisture in precision agriculture [95].…”