Sensors, Vol. 20, Pages 3461: Autonomous Search of Radioactive Sources through Mobile Robots

Sensors, Vol. 20, Pages 3461: Autonomous Search of Radioactive Sources through Mobile Robots Sensors doi: 10.3390/s20123461 Authors: Jianwen Huo Manlu Liu Konstantin A. Neusypin Haojie Liu Mingming Guo Yufeng Xiao The research of robotic autonomous radioactivity detection or radioactive source search plays an important role in the monitoring and disposal of nuclear safety and biological safety. In this paper, a method for autonomously searching for radioactive sources through mobile robots was proposed. In the method, by using a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), the search of autonomous unknown radioactive sources was realized according to a series of radiation information measured by mobile robot. First, the factors affecting the accuracy of radiation measurement during the robot’s movement were analyzed. Based on these factors, the behavior set of POMDP was designed. Secondly, the parameters of the radioactive source were estimated in the Bayesian framework. In addition, through the reward strategy, autonomous navigation of the robot to the position of the radiation source was achieved. The search algorithm was simulated and tested, and the TurtleBot robot platform was used to conduct a real search experiment on the radio source Cs-137 with an activity of 37 MBq indoors. The experimental results showed the effectiveness of the method. Additionally, from the experiments, it could been seen that the robot was affected by the...
Source: Sensors - Category: Biotechnology Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research