Marco is the name of a research mobile robot that is being developed at the Instituto de Robótica e Infomática Industrial of UPC-CSIC. It is designed with learning abilities to acquire information about indoor environments using various perception sensors. Marco uses video cameras and ultrasonic sensors to perceive the world, and pattern recognition and computer vision techniques to extract kno...

Wireless sensor network (WSN) of active sensors suffers from serious inter-sensor interference (ISI) and imposes new design and implementation challenges. In this paper, based on the ultrasonic sensor network, two time-division based distributed sensor scheduling schemes are proposed to deal with ISI by scheduling sensors periodically and adaptively respectively. Extended Kalman filter (EKF) is...

A key problem in behavior based control is to coordinate conflicts and competitions among multiple reactive behaviors. This paper presents a new method for behavior fusion for robot navigation in uncertain environments using fuzzy logic. The inputs to the proposed fuzzy control scheme consist of a heading angle between a robot and a specified target and the distances between the robot and the o...

This paper describes the design and development of a sensor based navigation system which makes it possible for a non-holonomous mobile robot to avoid obstacles using information on its environment picked up by a belt of ultrasonic sensors. To control the robot no preliminary information regarding its environment is required, the robot adapts to them through the information gathered on the spot...

The purpose of this study is the definition and conception of a measurement system capable of continuously determining the level of carbon type bulk products, stored in a large-sized tank (mine shaft). This storage system has several supply circuits and a tapping circuit using motorized conveyor belts. The measurement system, associated with a data processing procedure, makes it possible to est...

With the oil and gas industry growing rapidly, increasing the yield and profit require advances in technology for cost-effective production in key areas of reservoir exploration and in oil-well production-management. In this paper we review our group's research into fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) and their applications in the oil industry, especially in the well-logging field. FBG sensors used for...

This paper proposes the rule based and sensor based control strategies for a six-legged insect-like robot. This control scheme emulates the well-known insect behavior called “the reflex action.” Three types of sensors are embedded in the body of the robot, which are infrared sensors, ultrasonic sensors and limit switches for tracking performance, collision avoidance, and touching perception, re...

Personnel detection at border crossing becomes an important issue recently. To reduce the false alarm caused by nonhuman animals or the existence of multiple objects, it is important to discriminate between humans and nonhuman animals. In this paper, based on phenomenology of the differences between humans and four-legged animals, we propose using enhanced autocorrelation pattern for feature ex...

The problems of the development of high-temperature radiation resistant ultrasonic sensors operating in a liquid lead-bismuth alloy are analysed. Experimental diffusion bonded bismuth titanate sensors for operation up to 450 °C were developed. For acoustical coupling with a liquid metal the sensor protector is polished or coated by a diamond like carbon layer. The developed sensors survived hig...