Advanced sensor fusion in robotics with biomedical applications

In this proposal, the applicant aims to develop advanced sensor fusion techniques for both mobile robot and robotic arm. Sensor fusion techniques are becoming more and more popular in robotics for use in hazardous industrial environment, battlefield surveillance, exploration, and rehabilitation. The advance electronics technology allows robotic systems to have a great variety of sensors with lower cost. Therefore, multiple sensor data fusion has a key role in robotic systems, addressing the problem of data combination from multiple sensors. Major challenges facing robotics applications are how to systematically fuse all the sensor data together, regardless of the sensor type, resolution, and noise. To deal with those issues, the applicant and others have applied various approaches to synthesizing the rich information provided by multiple sensors. With six master students and two Ph.D candidates, the applicant plans to focus research in the area of mobile robot position estimation and robotic manipulator trajectory tracking. The objectives are given as follows: For short-term objectives, the applicant and his associates are going to derive the models for commonly used sensors, i.e., pan-tilt camera, ultrasonic sensor, GPS sensor, IMU navigation sensor, infrared sensor, to develop fusion algorithms for mobile robot localization and robotic manipulator trajectory tracking by fusing multiple types of sensor using artificial neural network and kalman filter, and to develop an integrated development environment for fusion algorithm verification and experimentation. Our long-term objective is to develop a general-purpose sensor fusion technology for both mobile robots and robot manipulator using multiple sensors, which will be implemented onto our B21r mobile robot and PA10 robotic Arm. In conjunction with industrial and hospital collaboration, results of proposed research will demonstrate the significance of the work on biomedical applications and other real physical systems such as climbing robots, wheeled robots and surgical robots.