Dams are important engineering facilities in the water conservancy industry. They have many functions, such as flood control, electric power generation, irrigation, water supply, shipping, etc. Therefore, their long-term safety is crucial to operational stability. Because of the complexity of the dam environment, robots with various kinds of sensors are a good choice to replace humans to perform a surveillance job. In this paper, an autonomous system design is proposed for dam ground surveillance robots, which includes general solution, electromechanical layout, sensors scheme, and navigation method. A strong and agile skid-steered mobile robot body platform is designed and created, which can be controlled accurately based on an MCU and an onboard IMU. A novel low-cost LiDAR is adopted for odometry estimation. To realize more robust localization results, two Kalman filter loops are used with the robot kinematic model to fuse wheel encoder, IMU, LiDAR odometry, and a low-cost GNSS receiver data. Besides, a recognition network based on YOLO v3 is deployed to realize real-time recognition of cracks and people during surveillance. As a system, by connecting the robot, the cloud server and the users with IOT technology, the proposed solution could be more robust and practical.
Keywords: autonomous navigation; dam surveillance; fusion localization; water conversancy robot.