UNMANNED VEHICLES  ROBOTARIUM  LAB

The Unmanned Vehicles (UVs) Robotics laboratory, created in 2004 and directed by Dr. Alex Ramirez-Serrano, is part of the Dept. of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering at the Univ. of Calgary. The laboratory performs Research and Development (R&D) activities in the following general areas:

• Unconventional Unmanned Vehicle Systems (UVS): Develop new robot design mechanisms to enhance ground (UGV), aerial (UAV), and underwater (UUV) vehicles enabling them to be able to cope with unpredictable situations, move faster, and be fully autonomous.    

• Reconfigurable mobile hybrid robots: Develop systems that can autonomously (physically and behavior-based) adapt to their surroundings.

• Humanoid robotics: Develop human-robot interaction mechanisms and faster navigation tools for humanoid and other types of walking robots using the robot's entire body to improve motion and movement in confined spaces.  

• Swarm robotics: Develop cooperation and navigation mechanisms to enable groups of heterogeneous/homogeneous teams of robots including marsupial, and UGVs + UAVs achieve efficient operation and enhance the use of their available resources if and when failures occur. 

• Intelligent control for UVS: Apply formal as well as artificial intelligence mechanisms for the control of highly non-linear robotic systems having a high number of degrees of freedom (DOF) under the presence or external and internal disturbances.

• Mobile manipulators: Develop effective UAVs, UGVs, and Underwater unmanned vehicles with robot manipulators to enable them to interact with their surroundings.

OUR AREAS OF APPLICATION INCLUDE:

• Urban Search & Rescue: Use robots in the three main phases of Urban Search& Rescue (USAR) operations: Sizeup, Search, and Rescue (e.g., deployed in collapsed buildings).

• Construction and Mining: Use robots in areas/spaces where traditional robots cannot access or eliminate the need for humans to be exposed to hazardous conditions (e.g., inspection of storage tanks in the oil and gas industry, sewer inspection and maintenance, etc).

• Inspection of critical infrastructure: Deploy robots to perform inspection, maintenance, and repair work on critical infrastructure such as mines, power lines, sewer systems, pipeline gas leak detection, etc.

• Humanoid robotics for pediatric care:  Use intelligent highly adaptable humanoid robots to distract children undergoing any medical procedure while enabling nurses and doctors to be more effective and work faster while enhancing children's medical experience.