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Global path planning is one of the key technologies for airport energy station inspection robots to achieve autonomous navigation. Due to the complexity of airport energy station buildings with numerous mechanical and electrical equipment and narrow areas, planning an optimal global path remains a challenge. This paper aimed to study global path planning for airport energy station inspection robots using an improved version of the Grey Wolf Optimizer (IGWO) algorithm. Firstly, the initialization process of the Grey Wolf Optimizer algorithm selects several grey wolf individuals closer to the optimal solution as the initial population through the lens imaging reverse learning strategy. The algorithm introduces nonlinear convergence factors in the control parameters, and adds an adaptive adjustment strategy and an elite individual reselection strategy to the location update to improve the search capability and to avoid falling into local optima. Benchmark function and global path planning simulation experiments were carried out in MATLAB to test the proposed algorithm's effectiveness. The results showed that compared to other swarm intelligent optimization algorithms, the proposed algorithm outperforms them in terms of higher convergence speed and optimization accuracy. Friedman's test ranked this algorithm first overall. The algorithm outperforms others in terms of average path length, standard deviation of path length, and running time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indoor fire accidents have become increasingly common in recent years. More and more firefighting robots have been designed to solve the problem of fires. However, the indoor environment is very complex, with high temperatures, thick smoke, more turns, and various burning substances. In this study, a firefighting robot with autonomous inspection and automatic fire-extinguishing functions intended for use in unknown indoor environments was designed. Considering water's poor efficiency and its inability to extinguish some combustion materials, other fire extinguishers were applied to design the extinguishing system. The robot can install four different extinguishers as required and select the appropriate fire extinguisher to spray it automatically. Based on the Cartographer SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) theory, a robot map-building system was built using Lidar scanners, IMU (inertial measurement unit) sensors, encoders, and other sensors. The accurate identification and location of the fire source were achieved using an infrared thermal imager and the YOLOv4 deep learning algorithm. Finally, the performance of the firefighting robot was evaluated by creating a simulated-fire experimental environment. In an autonomous inspection process of the on-fire environment, the firefighting robot could identify the flame in real-time, trigger the fire-extinguishing system to carry out automatic fire extinguishing, and contain the fire in its embryonic stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire robots are an effective way to save lives from fire, but their limited detection accuracy has greatly hampered their practical applications in complicated fire conditions. This study therefore proposes an advanced thermal imaging flame detection model of YOLOv4-F based on YOLOv4-tiny. We replaced the Leaky ReLU activation function with the Mish activation function in the YOLOV4-tiny feature extraction network. A Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) was also added to increase the receiving range of the feature extraction network. To improve the feature fusion efficiency between multi-scale feature layers, a Path Aggregation Network (PANet) was adopted to replace the YOLOv4-tiny Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) with full use of feature information; a high-quality dataset containing 14,757 thermal imaging flame images was built according to the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset standard. The results show that, when compared to the YOLOv4-tiny, YOLOv5-s, and YOLOv7-tiny models, the average detection accuracy of the proposed YOLOv4-F model is 5.75% higher, the average mAP of the five IOU cases rises by 7.02%, and the average detection confidence of three scaled flames shows a 18.09% gain. The proposed YOLOV4-F meets the requirements of fire robots on real-time responses and accurate flame detection, offering an important tool to improve the performance of the current fire robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]