Fuzzy Trajectory Planning and Redundancy Resolution for a Fire Fighting Robot Operating in Tunnels

In this paper the problem of automatic trajectory planning and inverse kinematics for a robotic system purposely designed to extinguish fires in road and railway tunnels is considered. The robot is composed by a self-cooling monorail vehicle carrying a fire fighting monitor. A fuzzy inference system is adopted for the automatic generation of the task-space trajectory for the robot and to solve the inverse kinematics problem in the presence of redundant degrees of freedom. Redundancy also allows assigning additional tasks besides the primary task. Simulation case studies are presented to test the performance of the whole system in a typical intervention scenario.