Title
Sediment Sampling in Estuarine Mudflats with an Aerial-Ground Robotic Team.
Abstract
This paper presents a robotic team suited for bottom sediment sampling and retrieval in mudflats, targeting environmental monitoring tasks. The robotic team encompasses a four-wheel-steering ground vehicle, equipped with a drilling tool designed to be able to retain wet soil, and a multi-rotor aerial vehicle for dynamic aerial imagery acquisition. On-demand aerial imagery, properly fused on an aerial mosaic, is used by remote human operators for specifying the robotic mission and supervising its execution. This is crucial for the success of an environmental monitoring study, as often it depends on human expertise to ensure the statistical significance and accuracy of the sampling procedures. Although the literature is rich on environmental monitoring sampling procedures, in mudflats, there is a gap as regards including robotic elements. This paper closes this gap by also proposing a preliminary experimental protocol tailored to exploit the capabilities offered by the robotic system. Field trials in the south bank of the river Tagus' estuary show the ability of the robotic system to successfully extract and transport bottom sediment samples for offline analysis. The results also show the efficiency of the extraction and the benefits when compared to (conventional) human-based sampling.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.3390/s16091461
SENSORS
Keywords
Field
DocType
multi-robot system,field robots,UGV,UAV,environmental monitoring,radiological monitoring,heavy metals monitoring,estuarine mudflats
Sediment,Robotic systems,Remote sensing,Estuary,Electronic engineering,Real-time computing,Exploit,Offline analysis,Sampling (statistics),Engineering,Aerial imagery,Environmental monitoring
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
16
9.0
1424-8220
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
2
Authors
15