Autonomous Navigation of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle for Soil Pollution Monitoring

Abstract

The growth in minor port projects along India's coastline due to burgeoning investor interest and the complete freedom given by the governments to private entrepreneurs to develop and operate these ports have led to several environmental and social costs. Activities around ports such as dredging, cargo operations, discharges from ships and industries that are setup along the coastline, and construction work have had a heavy toll on the marine ecology. To exacerbate the issue, several of the minor ports are situated in highly sensitive ecological regions. Local fishing communities are most impacted by the chemicals as well as other toxic materials that are being deposited in the soil and in the marine ecosystem. We propose an autonomous robotic system to periodically collect soil samples for pollution monitoring around the coastal regions as a step towards tackling the problem. In this work, we present a ROS based navigation system for the Clearpath Husky Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) to autonomously navigate on roads around coastal regions using an OSM map. Upon reaching the site to be monitored, the robot switches to a coverage algorithm for collecting soil samples from different sampling points.