Development of a robust mobile robot for volcano monitoring application

Abstract

Abstract Indonesia is one of the countries that lies in the pacific ring of fire, the highlighted area that known to be active by seismic and volcano activities. Indonesia has a total of 129 active volcanoes that make the land fertile, but also vulnerable to disaster. When a volcanic eruption occurs, the current fixed monitoring system is not fully reliable. On the other hand, monitoring of further volcano activities is critically needed in this situation. Therefore, a volcano monitoring system that can move freely and controlled safely is needed. To solve this problem, a mobile robot that capable of moving in volcano area has been developed. The robot locomotion system is designed with 2 DC motor using 4-wheel drive configuration. Each motor implements a PID Controller to adjust the speed that has been set. In addition, the robot is also equipped with a camera (Logitech C920), vibration sensor (ADXL 345), temperature sensor (DHT 11), carbon dioxide gas sensor (MG-811), and sulphur dioxide gas sensor (TGS 2602) to retrieve volcanic condition data, as its function for volcano monitoring. The microcontroller used to adjust motor control and read sensors data is Nucleo STM32-F466RE, while the mini-PC that being used for integrated data communication and processing is Raspberry PI 3B+. PID Controller has been successfully applied with average deviation of 2.5% for the left motor, and 2.75% for the right motor.