HAERA: Hybrid AERial Aquatic Robotic System for sampling, monitoring and intervention

Plan Estatal 2017-2020 Retos – Proyectos I+D+i
Referencia: PID2020-119027RB-I00
Septiembre 2021 a agosto 2024

Researchers: Aníbal Ollero Baturone y Ángel Rodríguez Castaño

 
 

 

Project abstract

HAERA is going to develop a hybrid aero-aquatic system for sampling, monitoring, and intervention to be used for water quality assessment in reservoirs and marshes. The system will be designed to maximize the coverage, increase the sampling frequency and success rate in the measurement of water quality, decrease the effect of spillages, and contribute to micro-plastic cleaning. Two different types of robotic systems will be integrated: fully-actuated multirotor robot and flapping wing bioinspired robot.

The fully actuated multirotor will be able to deploy and retrieve a robotic sailing probe with sensors and robotics devices for sampling, picking small objects and manipulation from the water surface, or at a small depth. It will also integrate a pump to collect water samples or small objects like micro-plastics. The multi-rotor will have high manoeuvrability vertical take-off and landing and payload enough for the robotic aquatic probe, but its main constraint is the limitation in the time of flight and range. The system will be autonomous, and it will be used in the visual line of sight of the operator, and back-up pilot, to meet regulations.

The flapping wing robot will land on the water surface and sail to take measurements and collect samples. It will provide better flight endurance and range than the multi-rotor system being able to fly fully autonomously beyond the visual line of sight, minimizing weight and increasing safety to meet the regulations. The flapping wings provide manoeuvrability to land and take samples in constrained environments. In order to increase the short term usability it will also develop a hybrid flapping- fixed wing prototype with a single small propeller to fly as a fixed wing aircraft, and sail on the water surface.

The robotic system will also include active sensing and perception for navigation through air and on the water by using on-board sensors. It will also perform mapping and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping with on-board cameras in case of GNSS denied, or partially denied, environments. Event cameras will be used on-board the flapping wing platform to compensate the motions generated by the flapping and the changes in lighting conditions. Furthermore, the system will include autonomous perception for landing, docking/releasing of the aquatic robotic probe as well as in sampling and intervention. These perception functionalities will be integrated with soft robotic morphing technologies to compensate for unavoidable perturbations in the docking and picking operations in natural environments.

HAERA also includes cooperative sampling and monitoring of a large area with multiple heterogeneous hybrid robots equipped with different measuring and sampling capabilities. This includes mission planning and task planning of the hybrid robots taking into account models of the energy consumed by the robots when flying, sailing, and perform sampling and intervention tasks, such as collecting the micro-plastics. Moreover, the system will include probabilistic motion planning taking into account environmental conditions, such as the wind, and cooperative perception taking into account the evolution of events such as spillages.

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