Hiroyuki Ishii

To create sustainable relationships between humans and nature, the first step should be understanding current condition of nature, precisely and deeply. For this aim, environmental monitoring is conducted standing on a variety of perspectives. It is also a very important approach to predict and prevent natural disasters. Macro level environmental monitoring is conducted using satellites or airplanes, while micro level environmental monitoring, in other words spot monitoring, is conducted by site visits of investigators. Environmental monitoring based on site visits of investigators requires high cost, and sometimes induces undesired damages on environment. Therefore, novel methodologies for spot monitoring with higher cost benefit performance and few environmental damages are expected. Thus, we have been proposing a methodology consisting with multiple mobile robots. We have developed an autonomous environmental monitoring robot, named WAMOT, which can autonomously locomote and measure condition of environment using onboard sensors. This robot has a unique mechanism consisting with two motors and ellipse legs, to locomote on uneven surfaces in natural environment, such as forest floors, grass fields, and rock surfaces. WAMOT has several onboard sensors such as a camera, microphone, temperature sensor, humidity sensor, and radiation sensor. A module to connect to existing mobile communication networks are embedded, and it sends the data obtained by onboard sensors to cloud storages such as google drive. We conducted several experiments using WAMOT not only in Japan but also in Italy. We are also developing another mobile robot, named WABEC, which has higher mobility than conventional mobile robots. WABEC has functions of running and jumping, and steps over obstacles or pockets on the ground. WABEC can be used to investigate narrow areas where WAMOT can not go enter. We are planning to use WABEC and WAMOT together and they complement each other. For example, WAMOT carries WABEC, and WABEC departs from WAMOT when the WAMOT finds the narrow space, where WAMOT can not enter into. Recently, we started developing another noiseless, ultrasmall and ultralight insect-like mobile robot for environmental monitoring. This robot has 6 legs, which are driven by shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators, and walks on the ground by them. The motivation to use SMA is to realize noise less motions to prevent disturbing target natural animals, such as Raptores, by mechanical noises. We are now developing climbing functions of this robot. This robot is expected to climb on the tree, and to stay there using spring mechanism. Because of this mechanism, this robot can keep its body on the wood without power supply. The goal of our study is to develop multimodal environmental monitoring system using multiple mobile robots introduced in this presentation.