Methods and implementation of contamination control on Milrem Robotics UGV sensors

Abstract

In this thesis two modules with different cleaning systems were designed. These modules contain the sensors and navigation lights used by the Milrem Robotics THeMIS UGV. The goal of the modules is to protect the sensors from external contamination and have the ability to clean the field-of-view of the camera in order to increase the image quality used by the onboard computer in autonomous mode. The modules also contain a set of sensors which are able to detect rain and mud on the outer surface. These sensors are used to initiate the cleaning system. A suitable method analysing the images before and after the cleaning was proposed. Lastly the method was put to use determining the best cleaning system designed. With these modules the UGV is able to get sensor data with better quality.