Robotic Systems for Environmental Monitoring and Terrain Characterization

• Author / Creator

  Olmedo, Nicolas Alejandro

• Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) can be integrated as part of environmental characterization campaigns in difficult terrains, such as oil sands tailings ponds. The feasibility of using such systems and designing sampling tool payloads which can deliver sufficient performance and reliability to perform field operations in the oil sands has not been previously achieved. A wheeled robotic system for collecting samples and characterizing mine waste deposit soil properties based on terramechanics models was designed and tested under field conditions. An automated vane shear test tool, designed for deployment and field operations onboard the UGV, was built and experimentally validated. A novel measurement apparatus was developed to estimate the inertia tensor of the robot for future simulation and model-based control design purposes. A modular robotic arm, used to deploy and wield the automated vane shear as well as a scoop-type sampler and an instrumented terramechanics wheel, was designed, built and tested in field trials. An improved terramechanics model for the scoop-type sampler was proposed, validated in simulation and experiment and shown to provide superior performance relative to the existing state-of-the-art model. The overall work and its contributions are summarized, limitations are analyzed, and recommendations for future work and commercialization of the developed technology are given.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • monitoring
  • terramechanics
  • inertia
  • environmental
  • robotic
  • vane shear
  • sampler
  • robot
  • tailings

• Graduation date

  Spring 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-4a0w-2452

• License

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