Autonomous exploration of a building

Project description

Together with the SSC, the Fontys Innovation Lab is researching ways to use applied robotics to solve the challenge of pre-exploring unknown locations (such as buildings or other indoor environments) using an unmanned autonomous platform. This task involves, among others, autonomous navigation, 3D mapping, route optimization, dealing with obstacles, vision-based object and human/animal recognition, and live data transmission.

Advancements in this field of robotics could help the police, military, rescue workers and other branches of governments in their operations by providing them with useful information about the environment where the robot is deployed from a safe distance, and could reduce the workload of robot operators in specialized teams.

Context

The Safety & Security Campus (SSC) is a collaboration between the Ministry of Defence, the police, fire brigade, customs, GGD and Brainport Eindhoven. The campus is currently located in Oirschot. The primary goal of the SSC is to test operationally useful applications of promising new technologies. The SSC primarily focuses on Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS). It is being investigated whether the SSC approach is also suitable for other new technologies. The approach of SSC has been created from partners within SSC, a joint research and development agenda that will continue for multiple years.

One of the objectives of SSC is safety. RAS allows any personnel to stay safe while still being able to approach a dangerous situation with a robot. While RAS also takes care of the scarcity of personnel within the security sector, as one less person is needed in an operation controlling the robot, robots also have the advantages of doing things that are difficult for humans (e.g., scanning environments with sensors and creating a 3D map of it).

Results

- 3D mapping in addition to 2D
The 3D mapping gives more information about its environment.

- Markers of detected objects
Objects of interests, that were already previously detected and taken a picture of, will now also receive a marker that can be seen on the visualization

- Start and Stop functionality on the controller
Easy usage of the unmanned platform which does not require extensive training to use.

- Return to home after exploration
The unmanned platform now return to home set by a user after exploration is done or stop is called.