Mobile robots for hazardous environments

This paper describes the development of a mobile robot ARK-2 (Autonomous Robot for Known Environments) that utilizes a number of sensors for navigation in a known relatively structured indoor environment. At present, there are robots that can be preprogrammed and that move along a specified path, but they use dead-reckoning to evaluate position at any point along their paths, and this can lead to major error accumulation through wheel slippage and running over unforeseen objects on the floor. The ARK-2 robot will have the intelligence to determine its position utilizing natural landmarks at any point along its path; it is this feature that gives ARK-2 its uniqueness as well as its ability to operate in an industrial environment. The project started in September 1991 and will last 4 yr. There are five organizations involved in the project: Ontario Hydro, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) CANDU, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), University of Toronto, and York University. Funding is provided by the organizations involved as well as the federal and provincial governments and PRECARN Associates, which is a nonprofit precompetitive research consortium made up of 38 members