A Mobile Robot for Hazardous Gas Sensing

This paper reports development of a robot that can sense the presence of hazardous gases in the environment. The robot aims at detection of hazardous gases and mapping global positioning system (GPS) locations of the detected gases to the navigation terrain in real-time. These information was transmitted to a hand-held device in a remote location for exploration of gas types, which holds promise for disaster management. The robot was equipped with a module of gas sensors, human detection sensor, GPS module and obstacle detection sensors in a coherent system. While navigating with collision avoidance to obstacles, the robot can transmit information about the presence of hazardous gases and human being in the area of navigation. It was tested in an uneven terrain to recognize the presence of hazardous gases like carbon dioxide, liquefied petroleum gas, vaporized alcohol gas vis-a-vis ambient gases in real-time. A ´ neural network-based classifier was implemented to recognize the gases with an average accuracy of 98%.