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Robotics and Sensing in Underground Environments

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensors and Robotics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 September 2022) | Viewed by 2631
Please feel free to contact Guest Editors or Special Issue Editor ([email protected]) for any queries.

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, Universidad de Sevilla, 41009 Sevilla, Spain
Interests: robot navigation; robot localization; aerial robots
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7491 Trondheim, Norway
Interests: Resilient robotic autonomy; robot control; path planning; Simultaneous Localization And Mapping

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Guest Editor
Centro Universitario de la Defensa, University of Zaragoza, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Interests: wireless communication; localization; computer vision
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Underground robotics and sensing have become increasingly popular in recent years as initiatives such as the DARPA subterranean challenge have shown. A wide variety of applications have been proposed, and several groups are presently working on these topics for the positive impact these have on society, such as sewer maintenance, search and rescue in case of disasters or accidents, or monitoring.

However, these environments have some particularities, such as being GPS-denied or having irregular, poor, or absent illumination, in addition to those related to communication that represent a real challenge due to the propagation patterns that largely differ from those in open space.

This Special Issue aims to present the latest research in this area, covering novel aerial and ground robotics field applications, theoretical analysis, communication architectures and protocols, hardware platforms, and wireless sensor networks frameworks for underground sensing.

Prof. Dr. Fernando Caballero Benítez
Prof. Dr. Kostas Alexis
Prof. Dr. Danilo Tardioli
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • Localization
  • Navigation
  • Planning
  • multi-robots
  • UAV
  • UGV
  • exploration
  • search and rescue

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

35 pages, 16268 KiB  
Article
Robot Localization in Tunnels: Combining Discrete Features in a Pose Graph Framework
by Teresa Seco, María T. Lázaro, Jesús Espelosín, Luis Montano and José L. Villarroel
Sensors 2022, 22(4), 1390; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s22041390 - 11 Feb 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2087
Abstract
Robot localization inside tunnels is a challenging task due to the special conditions of these environments. The GPS-denied nature of these scenarios, coupled with the low visibility, slippery and irregular surfaces, and lack of distinguishable visual and structural features, make traditional robotics methods [...] Read more.
Robot localization inside tunnels is a challenging task due to the special conditions of these environments. The GPS-denied nature of these scenarios, coupled with the low visibility, slippery and irregular surfaces, and lack of distinguishable visual and structural features, make traditional robotics methods based on cameras, lasers, or wheel encoders unreliable. Fortunately, tunnels provide other types of valuable information that can be used for localization purposes. On the one hand, radio frequency signal propagation in these types of scenarios shows a predictable periodic structure (periodic fadings) under certain settings, and on the other hand, tunnels present structural characteristics (e.g., galleries, emergency shelters) that must comply with safety regulations. The solution presented in this paper consists of detecting both types of features to be introduced as discrete sources of information in an alternative graph-based localization approach. The results obtained from experiments conducted in a real tunnel demonstrate the validity and suitability of the proposed system for inspection applications. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Robotics and Sensing in Underground Environments)
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