Autonomous Airborne Hazard Material Search and Monitoring
Find out about research focusing on developing agile and efficient solutions using mobile sensor platforms to detect hazardous materials for applications such as air quality monitoring, disaster management, and anti-terrorism.
Hazardous material detection, source search, and coverage monitoring are important for many applications; for example, air quality monitoring, monitoring accidently release of hazard substance (gas leakage), disaster management, and anti-terrorist. Traditionally, this is carried out by human such as the first responders with handheld detector devices, or sensor networks. The Centre focuses on developing agile and efficient solutions using mobile sensor platforms by taking advantages of the latest advances in sensing technologies, robotics and AI algorithms. Essentially, we develop a robotic sniffer dog or flying insect that is able to track an unknown source of interest using odours.
Various autonomous source search and coverage monitoring strategies have been developed using information theoretic and control-oriented approaches. We have conducted the world first experimental tests of cognitive search of chemical sources. The ground and air based search robots (e.g. mobile robots and UAV) have been developed by integrating the proposed cognitive search strategies and chemical and other sensors. The techniques and autonomous search systems we developed could find a wide range of applications; for example, detecting gas leakage in time for oil and gas platforms, and law enforcement for illegally discharging harmful pollution.
References
C Rhode, C Liu and W-H Chen (2023). Structurally aware 3D gas distribution mapping using belief propagation: a real-time algorithm for robotic deployment. IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 10.1109/TASE.2023.3249651.
M Hutchinson, C Liu, P Thomas, and W-H Chen (2020). UAV Based HAZMAT Response: Information-theoretic Hazardous Source Search and Reconstruction. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. Vol.27, No.3, pp.108-119. DOI: 10.1109/MRA.2019.2943006.
M Hutchinson, C Liu and W-H Chen (2019). Information Based Search for an Atmospheric Release Using a Mobile Robot: Algorithm and Experiments. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. Vol.27, No.6, pp.2388-2402. DOI: 10.1109/TCST.2018.2860548.