Design Development of VEhicle for Delivery of Goods in Hazardous Areas (VEDHA)

With the development of mankind and growth of our civilization, more and more need is felt for exploration of and working in hazardous environments. The fast development of technology and capability to perform complex computing has made it possible for mankind to remotely perform some work which would otherwise require manual working in close proximity of hazardous environment. Thus mankind has been able to develop remotely controlled vehicle to explore the hazardous environment. A semi-autonomous Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) is developed in the present work. A webcam and sensors mounted on the ROV transmits the picture of the immediate neighbourhood and data collected by sensors, to the computer stationed in a remote control room using a Arduino and a few other modules. The picture and sensor data are presented to the operator by a Man Machine Interface. The operator remotely controls the movement of the ROV using a Joystick interfaced to the computer. The ROV has been successfully tested in an infectious disease ward ( like covid ward) of a hospital to deliver medicine, food, clothes and goods to the patients who are suffering from infectious disease by a health care person controlling the ROV from a remote control room. © 2022 IEEE.

Case Study of Underwater Robot Contest for Young Students under an Outbreak of Infection Diseases

This paper reports on the Junior Class at the 'Underwater Robot Convention in JAMSTEC '20', a robot contest held in Japan. This event is an annual robot convention with AUV, Free, Junior, and AI Challenge classes. In 2020, the outbreak of Covid-19 restricted the use of the swimming pool, so we had to organize the Junior Class without the pool. Therefore, the authors changed the focus of the convention to presentations, which were held online. As a result, 6 teams with 32 members participated in the Junior Class. The participating teams were not restricted by travel restrictions and came from far away. Two teams built their own robots without using the kits distributed until last year among the participating teams. 65 people attended the presentations. 40% of the participants and visitors actively joined the convention by submitting comments. In addition, 32% of the comments were from participants and observers outside the junior class, which realized a fruitful discussion from a wide point of view. Because of mutual evaluation policy, these comments facilitated communication between not only the organizers and the participants but also the teams themselves. © 2021 MTS.