Radar helps robots to look through
As part of the EU Smokebot project, international partners from research, industry and future users have developed a mobile robot that can provide emergency services with valuable information remotely or even semi-autonomously. At the end of June 2018, the Smokebot prototype will be tested under real operating conditions at the Dortmund Fire Department.
The aim of the development is to develop a mobile robot that will support emergency services such as the police and fire brigade in the event of major fires, for example, so that they do not have to put themselves at risk to investigate the situation. Even in confusing environments and under harsh conditions, the robot should provide all the information necessary for the command and control of the situation. The project partners equipped it with a combination of sensors such as radar, cameras, laser scanners and gas detectors and integrated it into a mobile overall system. The merged data of all sensors can also be compared with emergency plans or maps and provide the emergency services with a detailed situation picture at a safe distance.
Where optical systems reach their limits, radar reliably detects objects or persons in its environment even in smoke, fog, dust or rain and harsh environmental conditions and is therefore predestined for this application. For use in robotics, the engineers at Fraunhofer FHR have developed a MIMO radar module for 3D obstacle detection that is only 25 cm in size and weighs only a few 100g. Highly integrated chip technology based on silicon-germanium ensures a very high resolution at a working frequency of 120 GHz even with these compact dimensions.
To this end, the scientists have once again significantly improved the integration process for the radar chip. This has made it possible to accommodate both signal generation and data acquisition in just one module, which can transmit all measurement data via a standard Ethernet interface without additional cables or external modules. The downstream processing allows a reconstruction of the recorded image information in 3D, so that the mobile robot locates obstacles in the area in front of them in three dimensions.
The resulting Smokebot demonstrator will be tested at the end of the project on 29 June by the project partners, including the Fraunhofer FHR, the Dortmund Fire Department, the Leibniz University Hanover and other universities and industrial partners from Germany, Austria, Sweden and Great Britain, in a fire house on the training grounds of the Dortmund Fire Department under real operating conditions. The joint research work is headed by Professor Achim Lilienthal from the University of Örebru, Sweden.
multi-mimo radar module makes robots see under fog and smoke
Fraunhofer FHR’s compact radar modules require very little power and can therefore be mounted not only on the smokebot but also on other small carriers or even drones and thus fulfil exploration tasks, for example. Three-dimensional detection and tracking of objects or persons with radar is particularly suitable for safety tasks, for example as an intelligent alarm system, for machine protection or for autonomous driving.
More information: https://www.fhr.fraunhofer.de/en.html
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