Abstract
Research in search, rescue, security, risky intervention, and environmental surveillance robotic systems represents a building up challenges for technologies and techniques to benefit human being and enhance quality of life and services. However, technology has become the solution to many long-standing problems, and while current technologies may be effective, it is far from fully addressing such huge, complex, difficult and challenging tasks associated with disaster missions and risky intervention.
In general, it is well known that disaster locations are too dangerous for human exploration or are physically unreachable while there is a need to make timely decision and extend help for survivors and respond to dangerous situations. Therefore, robotic solutions that are well adapted to local conditions of unstructured and unknown environment are highly important and can greatly improve safety and security of personnel as well as work efficiency, productivity and flexibility. Furthermore, continued research and development are needed to enhance performance and reliability of such robotic systems and eliminate/minimize their technical and functional limitations.
In this Special Issue, there are ten accepted full papers. These papers offer recognizable contributions from enthusiastic researchers whom are aiming to develop new robotic technologies, sensors and techniques that help to progress the field of rescue, search and risky intervention robotics. The papers are divided into four groups.
The first group of papers focuses on the important of the field, the challenges and technical requirements, research and development of real robots. This group includes three papers. The first paper titled: “Robot-Assisted Risky Intervention, Search, Rescue and Environmental Surveillance” by Maki K. Habib and Yvan Baudoin. This paper highlights the needs for suitable and reliable technology along with technical and functional requirements of robotic systems to fulfill task objectives. In addition, it shows that robotic technologies can be used for disasters prevention or early warning, intervention and recovery efforts during disasters with all possible kinds of relevant missions while ensuring quality of service and safety of human beings. The second paper titled: “JL-2: A Mobile Multi-robot System with Docking and Manipulating Capabilities”, by Wei Wang et al. The authors develop, implement and demonstrate a new version of the JL series reconfigurable multi-robot system called JL-2. To facilitate reconfigure-ability a motorized spherical joint is formed between two docked robots to enhance the locomotion capability of JL-2. The third paper titled: “An Autonomous Mobile Robotic System for Surveillance of Indoor Environments”, by Donato Di Paola et al. The paper proposes a system to handle autonomously general-purpose tasks and complex surveillance issues simultaneously. The proposed robotic surveillance scheme aims to address a number of basic problems related to environment mapping, localization and autonomous navigation, as well as surveillance tasks, like scene processing to detect abandoned or removed objects and people detection and following. The proposed scheme was demonstrated through experimental tests.
The second group of papers focuses on sensing, detection and learning techniques. It includes three papers. The first paper titled: “Combining Dense Structure from Motion and Visual SLAM in a Behavior-Based Robot Control Architecture”, by Geert De Cubber et al. The authors introduce the development of a control architecture that enables an outdoor mobile robot to navigate in a complex, natural environment while relying only on a single on-board camera as sensory input. This was achieved through a twofold analysis of the visual data stream: a dense structure from motion algorithm to calculate a depth map of the environment and a visual simultaneous localization, and mapping algorithm to build a map of the surroundings using image features. The second paper titled: “A Method for Detecting Breaches and New Objects in Multiple Outdoor Images”, by Guntur Tanjung et al. The paper presents an automated change detection method for detecting breaches in the integrity of and attached objects in front of fence wires in multiple outdoor images of the same scene containing fence wires acquired by a mobile camera from slightly different viewing positions, angles and at different times. The developed approach has been experimented and demonstrated. The third paper titled: “Learning long-range terrain perception for autonomous mobile robots”, by Mingjun Wang et al. The paper introduces a statistical prediction framework to enhance long-range terrain perception for autonomous mobile robots. The developed, implemented and tested framework not only includes appearance features as its prediction basis, but also incorporates spatial relationships between terrain regions in a principled way.
The third group of papers focuses on the development of multi robotic systems. It includes two papers. The first paper titled: “A Multi-Robot Control Architecture for Fault-Tolerant Sensor-Based Coverage”, by Metin Ozkan et al. The paper proposes fault-tolerant control architecture for sensor-based coverage. Robot failures are detected using the heartbeat strategy. The developed architecture was test using P3-DX mobile robots. The second paper titled: “Coordinated Formation Control of Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for Pipeline Inspection” by Xianbo Xiang et al. The paper addresses the problem of coordinated parallel path following control of AUVs, based on the leader-follower strategy while keeping the desired triangle formation to inspect underwater pipeline. The followers try to adapt its own speed according to the information of a generalized along path distance of the leader while minimizing errors.
The fourth group of papers focuses on the development of inspection of long pipes and medical robotic systems. It includes two papers. The first paper titled: “A Study of an Earthworm type Inspection Robot Movable in Long Pipes”, by Manabu Ono and Shigeo Kato. The paper describes the development, implementation and testing of three-somites earthworm type mobile inspection robot, which is able to move inside small and long pipes. The second paper titled: “Development of Biomedical Microrobot for Intravascular Therapy” by Sukho Park et al. The paper introduces the frontier program of the microrobot for intravascular therapy along with the required specifications and functionalities.
Finally, I would like to appreciate and thank Editors in Chief for their effort in making this Special Issue possible. In addition, I would like to thank all reviewers for their time, efforts and valuable and constructive comments. Finally, special thanks to all contributors of this Special Issue on Robotics for Risky Interventions and Environmental Surveillance.