While studying field of Safety Engineering at the university, I was simultaneously working on my Master of Science thesis which the precise title is: Preparation of a design and a prototype of an inspection robot for monitoring threats.

The decision to design and make the described robot was made due to the desire to develop a branch of robotics related to mobile inspection robots that can be used to help employees of uniformed services. During interventions in dangerous places, which, for example, are at risk of explosion, there may be a situation in which due to the prevailing conditions, it is impossible to estimate the number and location of the injured people. In such cases, inspection robots can be invaluable support, thanks to which it will be possible to examine hazards without exposing people to danger.

Model of the designed robot

The whole robot was designed in CAD program: Autodesk Inventor Professional 2020. The model consists of three types of parts: electronical, mechanical and structural.

Electronical heart of the device

Due to the fact that my promotor already had the Raspberry Pi 4B microcomputer in his supplies and propose me to use it I have made a decision to base the whole robot electronics around it. The most important tasks of this minicomputer include:

• operation of the interface used to control the robot,
• camera operation,
• GPIO pin support (general purpose input-output),
• wireless communication with the operator's device (e.g. computer).

Most important features of the robot

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the robot can operate wirelessly, transmitting data such as:

• picture taken from the camera every 5 seconds,
• battery level indicator (5 levels, every 20% of the capacity),
• alert information, if the hazardous concentration of gases was detected (carbon monoxide, propane-butane mixture, methane)

Robot program interface

To graphically present the data obtained wirelessly from the robot sensors and modules and to have the ability to controll the robot movement and camera zoom an interface was needed. I wrote the program in Python programming language with the usage of graphic library Tkinter.

Robot assembly

When I have acomplished all the work related to proper functioning of all of the robot modules, this is: preparing the mechanical parts, soldering electronics, programming, I have started the assembly of all parts.

You can see two buttons in the picture below, these are parts of the modules that I have made to could easily turn on and off the robot and to quickly check the charge level of the batteries.

Complete robot with the aluminum top cover plate.

Short video of the robot movement