ECE Graduate Student’s Research Featured as Cover Article of Intelligence & Robotics Journal
February 8, 2023
A Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s graduate student’s research was recently selected and featured on the front cover of the journal Intelligence & Robotics.
Tingjun Lei’s publication “An informative planning-based multi-layer robot navigation system as applied in a poultry barn” is in the December 2022 issue Intelligence & Robotics and highlights how a row-based autonomous robot navigation framework is developed for poultry barn applications, and it is highlighted on the cover.
Lei has proposed a directed coverage path planning (DCPP) algorithm fused with an informative planning protocol (IPP) to efficiently search and explore the entire poultry barn workspace. Such autonomous navigation models typically necessitate completely covering of the entire workspace along the robot’s running trajectory while optimizing travel distance, energy consumption and time, with many real-world applications in precision agriculture, poultry farms, forest surveillance, disaster response, industrial inspection and environmental sensing.
In indoor settings with limited sensing capabilities in poultry barns, autonomous robots are required to eliminate broiler mortality. Two robots are developed using a multi-layered DCPP system to detect and remove broiler mortality. One detection robot is utilized to search entire broiler barns and detect dead birds. The combination of informative path planning and DCPP enables a more efficient search of the entire broiler barn based on the historical data on the distribution of dead birds. The dead bird detector is embedded to detect and indicate the locations of dead broilers. The other removal robot moves directly to the corresponding dead broiler position in an optimized order to clear the dead birds.
Lei’s work is collaborated with Drs. Guoming Li, Chaomin Luo, Li Zhang and Richard Stephen Gates.
Tingjun Lei
Intelligence & Robotics is a journal that publishes top-quality unpublished original technical and non-technical application-focused articles on intelligence and robotics, particularly on the interdisciplinary areas of intelligence and robotics, and it is owned by OAE Publishing. Lei’s publication may be found on Intelligence & Robotics.
Tingjun Lei is a Ph.D. candidate under supervision of Associate Professor Dr. Chaomin Luo. Lei has won research awards during his graduate study, including ECE Graduate Researcher Award 2022-23, Best Paper Award – ICSI’2022, MSU Graduate Research Symposium Oral Winner Second Place 2022-23, Research Travel Award (ISACT’2022), ECE Research Symposium Winner First Place 2022-23, Student Research Travel Award (IEEE- ICHMS’2022) BCoE, MSU Graduate Research Symposium Poster Winner First Place 2021-22.
Incorporated with another project (publication) on deep learning-based complete coverage path planning with re-joint and obstacle fusion paradigm, these two projects are featured with the data science program at MSU.
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University consists of 27 faculty members (including seven endowed professors), seven professional staff, and over 700 undergraduate and graduate students, with approximately 100 being at the Ph.D. level. With a research expenditure of over $14.24 million, the department houses the largest High Voltage Laboratory among North American universities.