Engineering Commons^™

Design Of A Robotic Inspection Platform For Structural Health Monitoring, Jason R. Soto

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Actively monitoring infrastructure is key to detecting and correcting problems before they become costly. The vast scale of modern infrastructure poses a challenge to monitoring due to insufficient personnel. Certain structures, such as refineries, pose additional challenges and can be expensive, time-consuming, and hazardous to inspect.

This thesis outlines the development of an autonomous robot for structural-health-monitoring. The robot is capable of operating autonomously in level indoor environments and can be controlled manually to traverse difficult terrain. Both visual and lidar SLAM, along with a procedural-mapping technique, allow the robot to capture colored-point-clouds.

The robot is successfully able to automate …

Event And Time-Triggered Control Module Layers For Individual Robot Control Architectures Of Unmanned Agricultural Ground Vehicles, Tyler Troyer

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Automation in the agriculture sector has increased to an extent where the accompanying methods for unmanned field management are becoming more economically viable. This manifests in the industry’s recent presentation of conceptual cab-less machines that perform all field operations under the high-level task control of a single remote operator. A dramatic change in the overall workflow for field tasks that historically assumed the presence of a human in the immediate vicinity of the work is predicted. This shift in the entire approach to farm machinery work provides producers increased control and productivity over high-level tasks and less distraction from operating …

Obstacle Avoidance Subsystem For An Autonomous Robot, Kirstie King

Honors Program Projects

This research project details the design and implementation of the Obstacle Avoidance Subsystem for the Tigertron autonomous robot. This subsystem is designed to function as a smaller part of the whole Software Architecture and has the purpose of detecting, through use of a Laser Rangefinder, obstacles in the vehicle’s environment. Once the hardware is set up and configured, the Tigertron’s central software control architecture requests data from the Laser Rangefinder through a serial communication channel. This data is converted into objects that represent obstacles in the form of polar coordinates. These objects are stored in a container so the central …