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Engineering Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Aerospace Engineering

West Virginia University

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

2020

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Tangle-Free Exploration With A Tethered Mobile Robot, Danylo Shapovalov, Guilherme Pereira Jan 2020

Tangle-Free Exploration With A Tethered Mobile Robot, Danylo Shapovalov, Guilherme Pereira

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Exploration and remote sensing with mobile robots is a well known field of research, but current solutions cannot be directly applied for tethered robots. In some applications, tethers may be very important to provide power or allow communication with the robot. This paper presents an exploration algorithm that guarantees complete exploration of arbitrary environments within the length constraint of the tether, while keeping the tether tangle-free at all times. While we also propose a generalized algorithm that can be used with several exploration strategies, our implementation uses a modified frontier-based exploration approach, where the robot chooses its next goal in …


Large-Scale Inflatable Structures For Tunnel Protection: A Review Of The Resilient Tunnel Plug Project, Eduardo M. Sosa, Gregory J. Thompson, Gregory M. Holter, John M. Fortune Jan 2020

Large-Scale Inflatable Structures For Tunnel Protection: A Review Of The Resilient Tunnel Plug Project, Eduardo M. Sosa, Gregory J. Thompson, Gregory M. Holter, John M. Fortune

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The protection of underground civil infrastructure continues to be a high priority for transportation and transit security agencies. In particular, rail transit tunnels running under bodies of water are susceptible to disruptions due to flooding caused by extraordinary climatic events such as hurricanes or other events resulting from human activities. Several events have taken place in the past decades that have demonstrated the need to mitigate vulnerabilities or, at least, minimize the consequences of catastrophic events. Although it is impossible to prevent all situations that can lead to flooding, damage can be substantially decreased by reducing the area affected by …