A solution for robotized sampling in wastewater plants

Abstract

This work presents a solution to automatize the water sampling process of outdoor basins in a wastewater treatment plant. The system proposed is based on the utilization of collaborative robotics: a team of an UAV and a terrestrial robotic platform make a route along the plant collecting and storing the water samples. The architecture of the designed system is described in terms of functional blocks, and implementation details including software frameworks and hardware on the UAV are provided. As the objective of the system is industry levels of robustness and performance, the UAV use is minimized and subjected to control from the robotic ground platform, reducing risks associated with autonomous UAV. To conclude, results from experiments performed to validate the viability of the system and study several design decisions are presented and briefly discussed, including: estimation of the accuracy of several GNSS technologies on the plant, viability of the landing operation over a mobile robotic platform and controlling a quadrotor over waters.