Unit 6: Robotic Sensor Applications and Use cases from Industry - Practice Quiz

ECE246 — Sensors For Robotics 60 Questions
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1 What does a tactile sensor help a robot detect?

Use cases in tactile sensing Easy
A. Physical contact and pressure
B. Battery charging time
C. Room lighting level
D. Wireless network speed

2 Which robotic task commonly uses tactile sensing?

Use cases in tactile sensing Easy
A. Changing network passwords
B. Measuring internet traffic
C. Grasping objects gently
D. Printing software code

3 What is a main feature of a soft robot?

Soft robotics Easy
A. Rigid metal-only structures
B. Flexible and deformable parts
C. Fixed wheels without joints
D. Stationary electronic controls

4 Which sensor is useful for detecting bending in a soft robotic arm?

Soft robotics Easy
A. Barcode printer
B. Flex or strain sensor
C. Smoke detector
D. Loudspeaker

5 Which sensor can help a welding robot follow a joint accurately?

Robotic arc welding sensors Easy
A. Keyboard position sensor
B. Audio playback sensor
C. Seam tracking sensor
D. Temperature clock

6 What is the purpose of a welding arc sensor?

Robotic arc welding sensors Easy
A. To count warehouse shelves
B. To monitor the welding arc
C. To measure tire pressure
D. To identify human voices

7 Which sensor is commonly used to measure the distance to nearby objects?

Use cases of sensor in robot navigation Easy
A. Ultrasonic sensor
B. Microphone amplifier
C. Color printer
D. Humidity sensor

8 How can cameras help a mobile robot navigate?

Use cases of sensor in robot navigation Easy
A. By increasing wheel size
B. By detecting visual features
C. By producing mechanical force
D. By storing extra fuel

9 What does an inertial measurement unit, or IMU, commonly measure?

Use cases of sensor in robot navigation Easy
A. Liquid color only
B. Welding wire thickness
C. Soil nutrient content
D. Motion and orientation

10 What does a chemical sensor detect?

Chemical sensing Easy
A. A robot's wheel diameter
B. A motor's brand name
C. A chemical substance or property
D. A camera's image size

11 Which sensor is commonly used to measure acidity?

Chemical sensing Easy
A. pH sensor
B. Light barrier
C. Proximity sensor
D. Gyroscope

12 Which application can use a gas sensor on a robot?

Chemical sensing Easy
A. Counting motor rotations
B. Measuring wheel height
C. Displaying a map
D. Detecting a gas leak

13 Which sensor is often used in a wearable fitness tracker?

Use cases in wearables Easy
A. Robot gripper sensor
B. Welding seam sensor
C. Heart-rate sensor
D. Industrial gas valve

14 What can an accelerometer in a wearable device detect?

Use cases in wearables Easy
A. Chemical acidity
B. Air pressure in tires
C. Metal joint position
D. Movement and activity

15 Which sensor can help an agricultural robot decide when crops need water?

Use cases of sensors in agriculture Easy
A. Arc voltage sensor
B. Soil moisture sensor
C. Hand gesture sensor
D. Wheel speed sensor

16 How can cameras be used in agricultural robots?

Use cases of sensors in agriculture Easy
A. To charge robot batteries
B. To sharpen cutting blades
C. To identify crop conditions
D. To increase soil temperature

17 Which sensor can help a military robot detect nearby obstacles?

Use cases in military Easy
A. pH sensor
B. Soil nutrient sensor
C. Heart-rate sensor
D. LiDAR sensor

18 What is one use of sensors on an unmanned military vehicle?

Use cases in military Easy
A. Household meal preparation
B. Remote area surveillance
C. Office document printing
D. Clothing size selection

19 Which sensor can help a healthcare robot monitor a patient's body temperature?

Use cases in healthcare Easy
A. Ultrasonic parking sensor
B. Soil moisture sensor
C. Seam tracking sensor
D. Temperature sensor

20 How can sensors help a robotic prosthetic hand?

Use cases in healthcare Easy
A. By replacing all patient training
B. By growing replacement tissue
C. By producing medical medicine
D. By detecting grip force

21 A robotic gripper must pick up fragile glass objects without cracking them. Which tactile-sensing capability is most important for this task?

Use cases in tactile sensing Medium
A. Measuring the rotation speed of a joint
B. Estimating the robot's battery temperature
C. Measuring contact force at the fingertips
D. Detecting the distance to a nearby wall

22 A robot is sorting objects covered by a thin opaque sheet. Which tactile-sensing method would best help it distinguish a hard object from a soft object?

Use cases in tactile sensing Medium
A. Measuring motor winding temperature
B. Measuring deformation during contact
C. Measuring wireless signal strength
D. Measuring ambient light intensity

23 Why are pressure sensors commonly embedded in pneumatic soft robotic actuators?

Soft robotics Medium
A. To estimate actuator position from air pressure
B. To eliminate the need for any controller
C. To increase the electrical conductivity of the actuator
D. To measure the color of the actuator surface

24 A soft robotic gripper handles fruits with different shapes and firmness levels. Which sensor arrangement would most directly improve adaptive gripping?

Soft robotics Medium
A. A single microphone mounted near the controller
B. Distributed pressure sensors along the fingers
C. An accelerometer fixed to the charging station
D. A temperature sensor on the power supply

25 During robotic arc welding, the workpiece is slightly misaligned from its expected position. Which sensor is most useful for maintaining the weld path?

Robotic arc welding sensors Medium
A. A thermistor inside the robot base
B. A through-arc current sensor
C. A microphone near the operator station
D. A humidity sensor in the factory

26 A laser seam-tracking sensor is installed ahead of a welding torch. What is its primary role?

Robotic arc welding sensors Medium
A. Controlling the shielding-gas composition
B. Replacing the welding power source
C. Locating the joint before the torch reaches it
D. Measuring the robot's joint lubrication level

27 A mobile robot operates in a warehouse where shelves can change position. Which sensor combination is most suitable for detecting obstacles and updating a local map?

Use cases of sensor in robot navigation Medium
A. LiDAR with wheel encoders
B. A strain gauge with a gas sensor
C. A microphone with a soil-moisture probe
D. A thermocouple with a barometer

28 A delivery robot uses wheel odometry but gradually drifts from its actual position. Which additional sensor would best reduce this accumulated error in an outdoor environment?

Use cases of sensor in robot navigation Medium
A. A GPS receiver
B. A fingertip pressure sensor
C. A blood-oxygen sensor
D. A welding arc sensor

29 A robot must navigate through a dim corridor containing transparent obstacles. Which sensing approach is most reliable as a primary aid?

Use cases of sensor in robot navigation Medium
A. An air-pressure sensor used alone
B. A soil-pH sensor combined with odometry
C. Depth sensing combined with ultrasonic sensing
D. A visible-light camera used alone

30 A service robot monitors indoor air quality and must warn occupants when carbon monoxide reaches a hazardous level. Which sensor is required?

Chemical sensing Medium
A. A carbon-monoxide gas sensor
B. A piezoelectric vibration sensor
C. A capacitive proximity sensor
D. A rotary position encoder

31 A robotic platform analyzes water from a treatment plant. Which sensor would directly help determine whether the water is acidic or alkaline?

Chemical sensing Medium
A. A magnetic-field sensor
B. A camera exposure sensor
C. A six-axis inertial sensor
D. A pH sensor

32 A wearable device is designed to detect whether a user has fallen. Which measurement is most useful for identifying a sudden fall event?

Use cases in wearables Medium
A. Skin color and ambient brightness
B. Acceleration and body orientation
C. Battery voltage and radio frequency
D. Air humidity and sound pressure

33 A wearable rehabilitation device measures a patient's elbow movement during exercise. Which sensor is most appropriate for estimating joint angle?

Use cases in wearables Medium
A. A carbon-dioxide sensor
B. A soil-conductivity sensor
C. A welding-voltage sensor
D. An inertial measurement unit

34 An autonomous irrigation robot must water only crop areas with insufficient moisture. Which sensor provides the most direct measurement for this decision?

Use cases of sensors in agriculture Medium
A. A motor-current sensor
B. A microphone array
C. A wheel-speed sensor
D. A soil-moisture sensor

35 A farm robot uses cameras to identify diseased leaves. Which additional sensor would most improve detection when disease changes leaf temperature before visible symptoms appear?

Use cases of sensors in agriculture Medium
A. A thermal infrared sensor
B. A joint torque sensor
C. A barometric pressure sensor
D. A wheel encoder

36 An unmanned ground vehicle must detect nearby personnel and obstacles while operating at night. Which sensor combination is most suitable?

Use cases in military Medium
A. Thermal imaging with LiDAR
B. A strain gauge with a soil sampler
C. A pH probe with a hygrometer
D. A pulse sensor with a colorimeter

37 A reconnaissance drone must maintain stable flight during strong wind gusts. Which sensor data is most important for rapid stabilization?

Use cases in military Medium
A. Soil pH and moisture data
B. Tactile pressure and force data
C. Gyroscope and accelerometer data
D. Gas concentration and humidity data

38 A hospital robot transports medication and must avoid entering a patient's bed area. Which sensor is most useful for detecting the boundary around the bed?

Use cases in healthcare Medium
A. A gas chromatograph
B. A depth camera
C. A welding-current sensor
D. A glucose sensor

39 A rehabilitation exoskeleton should assist a patient only when the patient begins moving. Which sensor signal would provide the most direct intent cue?

Use cases in healthcare Medium
A. Ambient light from a photodiode
B. Muscle activity from an EMG sensor
C. Distance from an ultrasonic sensor
D. Room temperature from a thermistor

40 A wearable health monitor reports a falsely low heart rate whenever the user runs. Which improvement would most likely reduce motion-related errors?

Use cases in healthcare Medium
A. Combine optical sensing with inertial data
B. Reduce sampling while the user is moving
C. Replace the sensor with a humidity probe
D. Use only a temperature sensor for heart rate

41 A robotic gripper must handle objects whose stiffness is unknown and whose surfaces may be wet. Which tactile-sensing strategy best supports reliable grasping while minimizing object damage?

Use cases in tactile sensing Hard
A. Use distributed multimodal sensing with force, slip, and contact-location estimation
B. Use proximity sensing to replace physical contact feedback
C. Use force thresholds from rigid fingertip sensors only
D. Use a single high-resolution pressure sensor at the wrist

42 A tactile array reports a constant increase in pressure across every taxel immediately after the gripper closes, although the object has not moved. Which diagnosis is most likely, and what compensation is appropriate?

Use cases in tactile sensing Hard
A. Object slip; increase the grip force immediately
B. Contact fragmentation; increase the sampling interval
C. Global bias drift; estimate and subtract a baseline
D. Taxel saturation; replace the object model

43 A pneumatic soft continuum arm bends differently at the same commanded pressure after repeated operation. Which sensing architecture most directly enables closed-loop compensation for this behavior?

Soft robotics Hard
A. A camera observing only the end effector
B. Embedded distributed strain sensing along the arm
C. A pressure sensor installed upstream of the valve
D. An encoder mounted only at the motor controller

44 A soft robotic gripper must grasp an irregular fruit without bruising it, but its pneumatic pressure is affected by ambient temperature. Which control variable is most suitable for the primary safety constraint?

Soft robotics Hard
A. Valve duty cycle alone
B. Commanded chamber pressure alone
C. Measured contact force or pressure distribution
D. Pump current alone

45 During robotic arc welding, the seam tracking camera becomes unreliable because of arc glare and smoke. Which sensor arrangement provides the most robust complementary measurement for maintaining torch alignment?

Robotic arc welding sensors Hard
A. A laser profiler with optical filtering and calibrated standoff sensing
B. A higher-gain camera using the same exposure settings
C. A wrist encoder with no external seam measurement
D. A microphone tuned to the robot's joint frequencies

46 A weld robot shows periodic lateral seam-tracking error even though the vision system detects the seam correctly. The error frequency matches wire-feed fluctuations. Which corrective action is most appropriate?

Robotic arc welding sensors Hard
A. Filter or synchronize measurements with the wire-feed disturbance
B. Disable seam tracking during the entire weld
C. Increase camera resolution without changing control timing
D. Increase robot speed to average out the error

47 A mobile robot uses wheel odometry and lidar in a warehouse containing long, repetitive aisles. Which failure mode is most likely if localization relies heavily on scan matching, and which mitigation is strongest?

Use cases of sensor in robot navigation Hard
A. Geometric aliasing; fuse odometry with distinctive landmarks or IMU data
B. Magnetic interference; remove all reflective surfaces
C. Lidar overheating; increase scan frequency
D. Wheel encoder saturation; lower the motor voltage

48 A delivery robot must navigate indoors where lidar is degraded by transparent doors and cameras are degraded by low light. Which sensor-fusion design is most appropriate?

Use cases of sensor in robot navigation Hard
A. Fuse lidar, camera, inertial, and wheel measurements with confidence weighting
B. Use camera depth as the only obstacle source
C. Use wheel odometry and increase the navigation speed
D. Use lidar as the only localization source

49 An electronic nose identifies solvent leaks using an array of partially selective gas sensors. Sensor responses drift with humidity and temperature. Which method best preserves classification accuracy over time?

Chemical sensing Hard
A. Discard sensors whose baseline changes during operation
B. Normalize responses and periodically recalibrate with environmental references
C. Use a larger fixed alarm threshold for every gas
D. Classify each gas using only the most sensitive sensor

50 A robot samples air near a suspected toxic plume, but its sensor has a slow response and the robot moves rapidly through the plume. Which design change most improves source localization?

Chemical sensing Hard
A. Average all readings over the entire mission
B. Model sensor dynamics and combine concentration gradients with wind measurements
C. Use only the peak concentration recorded at the final waypoint
D. Increase the robot speed to collect more samples

51 A wearable rehabilitation device estimates knee angle using inertial sensors, but readings drift during a long exercise session. Which additional measurement most directly constrains accumulated orientation error?

Use cases in wearables Hard
A. A joint-mounted mechanical or optical angle reference
B. A higher sampling rate for the existing gyroscope
C. A magnetometer used without magnetic-interference detection
D. A second gyroscope aligned with the first

52 A wearable fall detector must distinguish a true fall from a user quickly sitting in a chair. Which feature combination is most discriminative?

Use cases in wearables Hard
A. Instantaneous acceleration magnitude only
B. Step count accumulated during the previous hour
C. Acceleration, angular velocity, posture transition, and impact timing
D. Heart rate measured after the event only

53 A precision-irrigation system uses soil-moisture sensors in fields with strongly varying soil texture. A single moisture threshold causes overwatering in some zones. Which strategy is most appropriate?

Use cases of sensors in agriculture Hard
A. Replace moisture sensing with air-temperature sensing
B. Apply the threshold globally after averaging all sensors
C. Ignore soil texture and increase irrigation frequency
D. Calibrate each zone and control irrigation using plant-available water

54 An agricultural robot detects crop stress using multispectral imagery, but shadows and changing sunlight produce false positives. Which processing approach best addresses the issue?

Use cases of sensors in agriculture Hard
A. Normalize reflectance and include illumination-invariant vegetation indices
B. Use raw intensity thresholds for each spectral band
C. Increase image contrast independently for every field row
D. Classify plants using only the visible red channel

55 An unmanned ground vehicle operates in a GPS-denied urban environment where communications may be intermittent. Which navigation architecture best supports continued operation?

Use cases in military Hard
A. Remote teleoperation using a high-bandwidth video link
B. GPS waypoint following with longer signal timeouts
C. Dead reckoning alone with no map updates
D. Local sensor fusion with inertial, lidar, vision, and terrain-relative mapping

56 A reconnaissance robot must detect a concealed person in vegetation while minimizing false alarms from warm rocks and sunlit surfaces. Which sensor combination is most effective?

Use cases in military Hard
A. Long-wave infrared, visible imagery, and motion or shape analysis
B. Ultrasonic range sensing and magnetic sensing
C. Visible camera and wheel encoders
D. A high-resolution microphone and barometric sensor

57 A surgical robot uses force sensing at the instrument tip, but cable friction creates hysteresis between measured motor torque and actual tissue force. Which solution best improves force-limited manipulation?

Use cases in healthcare Hard
A. Increase motor torque and remove force limits
B. Use joint position alone to infer tissue stiffness
C. Reduce sensor resolution to suppress measurement noise
D. Estimate friction online and calibrate force at the instrument tip

58 A hospital transport robot must operate near patients, wheelchairs, and IV poles. Which sensing policy most appropriately balances collision avoidance and efficient motion?

Use cases in healthcare Hard
A. Use a fixed stopping distance for every object
B. Ignore objects classified as stationary during route planning
C. Use only a forward camera with object classification
D. Fuse 3D ranging with semantic detection and velocity-aware safety zones

59 A wearable glucose-monitoring system produces occasional physiologically impossible jumps during exercise. Which validation method should be used before triggering an automated insulin adjustment?

Use cases in healthcare Hard
A. Trigger insulin changes from the largest observed excursion
B. Replace abnormal readings with the previous value permanently
C. Accept every reading because frequent sampling ensures accuracy
D. Use temporal plausibility checks and redundant physiological measurements

60 A robot must insert a connector into a socket with tight positional tolerance. Vision provides approximate alignment, while tactile sensors detect contact. Which control strategy best handles small pose errors after contact?

Use cases in tactile sensing Hard
A. Disable tactile feedback after the first contact
B. Increase insertion velocity to overcome misalignment
C. Use force-guided compliance with constrained search along the insertion axes
D. Maintain high Cartesian stiffness in all directions