Research and Development of Obstacle Avoidance Systems for Mobile Robotics
2016
Leslie Robert Adrian

Defending
20.06.2016. 16:00, EEF, Āzenes 12/1, 212. auditorijā

Supervisor
Leonīds Ribickis

Reviewers
Oskars Krievs, Aleksandrs Gasparjans, Said El Hajjar

The presented Doctoral Thesis is devoted to the research and development of obstacle avoidance systems for autonomous mobile robotics applications and in particular to the development of a mobile robotic vehicle to enable further investigative research into passive or read only sensory systems in autonomous robotics. The avoidance system primarily described includes pyroelectric, modified pyroelectric and infra-red sensors and includes photodiodes in a reverse biased configuration, all of which represent a passive Rx system reliant only upon external electromagnetic spectral stimulation. Significant drawbacks exist in the development of a system, which effectively flies in the face of existing methods, and in particular, reference is made to the more commonly utilized systems for robotic maneuvering and mobility. Such systems will be briefly covered within this thesis, however those systems almost exclusively involve emitter/receiver configuration and rarely rely upon read only configuration. The creation of a read only system allows the investigation of various methods to assimilate received data from the environment and specifically in relation to the dynamic changes which are inevitable within those environments. With the emergence of higher level robotics systems comes the need for the enhancement of existing systems, adaption of older systems and the development of new systems capable of an acceptable result. Autonomous robotics requires modules with freedom and independence from external control themselves in order to fulfill the requirement of a fully autonomous system. However, fully autonomous systems also have significant drawbacks being that after manufacture and programming they are effectively free to succeed or fail without external interference. The measure of success and failure is therefore in the hands of the engineer or programmer and at the extremes of the environment chosen as the exploratory field. Initial costs should be offset by lower system maintenance costs and far less energy consumption within environments where energy sources are scarce and received also from limited resources. The service life of the system must also form a part of the equation, especially in scenarios where extreme distance environments are concerned such as interplanetary exploration. In this scenario the system may be partially autonomous and partial remotely controlled and a hybrid involving both systems seems more than appropriate when deciding to deal with one or the other as when one method fails a legacy system may prevail. There are a few problematic elements to examine. The first being the variable nature of light itself and secondly obtaining this data for processing in a way that provides sufficient and suitable reactive response from the mobile robot. Due to the dynamic nature of a given environment the issues related to obstacle 5 avoidance can be very complicated, therefore the main focus of this research is aimed at the problems relating to passive detection of objects and obstacles and applications to properly address these. A summary of conventional obstacle avoidance techniques are described within the introduction chapters of the Doctoral Thesis and include an outline of possible benefits and disadvantages of existing systems. The main objectives and hypotheses of the research and development have been defined. Parts of the Doctoral Thesis are included as proposals to issues both in parallel or direct subsidiaries to the proposed system. The primary benefits of utilizing a read only sensory system are exceptionally low energy consumption, extreme longevity or product life and a large sensor variant and programming method range, constrained only by the imagination of the researcher or developer. The Doctoral thesis has been written in English. All summaries and conclusions and the results of the research relate to the hypothesis and the relationship between them. Some of the research has evolved into other projects consisting of various methodologies extracted from the investigations.


Keywords
mobile robotics

Adrian, Leslie Robert. Research and Development of Obstacle Avoidance Systems for Mobile Robotics. PhD Thesis. Rīga: [RTU], 2016. 125 p.

Publication language
English (en)
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