Helmy Widyantara when he presented his dissertation on an open session of doctoral promotion in the Department of Electrical Engineering

ITS Campus, ITS News – Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) successfully brings new Doctor, Helmy Widyantara from Department Electrical Engineering ITS in an open session of his doctorate promotion, Monday (24/2). Helmy presented a study for a dissertation titled The Gas Source search system using a combination of Gas sensors and an Anemo Meter Hot Wire implemented on the Mobile Robot.

According to Helmy, frequent gas accidents include fairly crucial and harmful problems. These accidents often occur in chemical storage warehouses, gas distribution pipes, and toxic gas terror. Manual detection of gas presence is difficult to do. “The reason, some gas types have no color and smell,” he said.

Also, added lecturer from Ngawi, gas substances are easy to move and have diffuse properties filling the whole room. Departing from the issue, Helmy indicated that the rapid discovery of a source of gas leakage is a key to preventing and reducing catastrophe. “However, the gas tracking process cannot be done manually because of the big risk to the safety of the officer’s life,” Helmy says.

For that, according to Helmy, the use of mobile robots comes as a brilliant solution for finding the location of gas leaks effectively. But, acclaimed Helmy, it’s not easy to operate a mobile robot in a spacious room with dynamic wind direction. “This is because the flow of air that hit the objects and humans caused the existence of mechanical turbulence,” said the man who completed the education S1 in Computer Engineering, Institute of Business and Informatics STIKOM Surabaya.

This mechanical turbulence can affect the spread direction of odor plume (threads used to analyze the movement of fluid flow) and to make the robot lose track. The meaning of mechanical turbulence is turbulence caused by the flow of air crashing obstacles around it. Using a stereo combination method of gas sensor and omnidirectional wind direction sensors, the mobile robot’s navigation can be significantly helped to rediscover the odor plume traces as wind changes occur.

“The robot’s success rate for locating gas sources reached 90 percent in pattern airflow and 70 percent in mechanical turbulence,” Helmy said. While the combination of wind direction sensor with gas sensor stereo can also shorten the search mileage by 2.4 percent and shorten the travel time by 45.9 percent compared with the search location that uses gas sensors only.

According to Helmy, to find the location of a gas source leak using a mobile robot with dynamic wind conditions, it takes three stages. The first is the search odor plume, then search odor plume, and the last is to find the location of the gas leak. “Furthermore, the identification of the type of gas detected,” he added.

At this time, the lecturer who born on 17th January 1979, said the electronic nose helped to identify the gas as the human nose. In this study, Analog Neural Network Immitation (JST) for electronic nose has been successfully implemented in Field Programmable Analog Array (FPAA) with a success rate of 100 percent in detecting vapors originating from diesel, gasoline, methanol, and butane.

When combined with the odor plume tracing method with a stereo combination of gas sensors and wind direction sensors, it is certainly able to produce a search system and identify gas leaks that can be applied to public areas such as airports and subway station. “The combination of this method has better performance and more effective,” said the Lecturer of Departement of Computer Engineering Telkom Institute of Technology Surabaya.

To stay grounded, Helmy hopes to continue the research he has outlined since 2016 this has become better than ever to be the Ministry of Research and Technology or research agency and National Innovation (Kemenristek/BRIN). “I will also continue to coordinate with promoters to develop this research,” he concluded.(chi/rev/ITS Public Relations)

Helmy Widyantara wit his family and promotors aften his open session of doctoral promotion