Refinery Inspection by Autonomous mobile robot based on WIFI communication

Abstract

This prototype focuses on the system which is useful for Oil and gas refineries that can be a dangerous environment for many reasons, including toxic gases, heats and catastrophic failures. In order to avoid the dangerous accidents occurring in industries and oil refineries, a mobile robotic platform is developed and implemented. Here we focus on the use of Wi-Fi for communication between user and robot and for localizing the robot. Many efficient algorithms are developed and tested to minimize the total number of Wi-Fi access points (APs) and their locations in any given environment while taking into consideration the throughput requirements and the need to ensure every location in the region can reach at least k APs. When multiple Wi-Fi APs are close together, there is a potential for interference. Graph-coloring heuristic was used to determine AP channel allocation. In addition to this, Wi-Fi fingerprinting based localization is also developed and implemented. All the algorithms implemented are tested in real world scenarios with the robot developed and results are accurate.