A Modular and Scalable Electronic System for Mobile and Autonomous Robots

The goal of this research was to develop a fuzzy obstacle avoidance system for an autonomous mobile robot using IR detection sensors. This paper presents implemented control architecture for behavior-based mobile robot. The mobile robot is able to interact with an unknown environment using a reactive strategy determined by sensory information. Current research in robotics aims to build autonomous and intelligent robots, which can plan its motion in a dynamic environment. Autonomous mobile robots are increasingly used in well structured environment such as warehouses, offices and industries. Fuzzy behavior able to make inferences is well suited for mobile robot navigation because of the uncertainty of the environment. A rule-based fuzzy controller with reactive behavior was implemented and tested on a two wheels mobile robot equipped with infrared sensors to perform collision-free navigation. The experimental results have shown that the proposed architecture provides an efficient and flexible solution for small wheeled mobile robots.

The purpose of this paper is to detail the development of a mobile robot and control support system. The robot has five infrared (IR) ray sensors and three ultrasonic sensors to enable it to follow a guide person with an IR ray transmitter. The robot follows the IR rays emitted by the transmitter and moves towards its destination. The control system has been developed by using network technology (client/server model) based on the TCP/IP protocol; the CPU of the robot system has a low-enough speed for this. The advanced control strategy for the mobile robot is carried out with a high-speed host server computer connected through the TCP/IP network. In this paper, the autonomous mobile robot system and the control support system aided by the TCP/IP network are described.

Developing autonomous mobile robots that can coexist with human in populated environments is still considered a big challenge. To address this problem the authors propose a novel scheme to assist mobile robots by providing localization information externally. This scheme combines the autonomous navigation and target tracking research fields to arrive at a structured assistance system for autonomous mobile robots. In the proposed scheme, the environment is sensed using a laser range finder and camera based sensor unit. Using Rao-Blackwellized particle filter technique, the robots that need assistance are continuously tracked. In contrast with conventional laser range finder based tracking systems, the placement of sensor is changed to a level above average human height and the mobile robots are modified by attaching a cylindrical pole. The experiments show the validity of the proposed scheme for simultaneous localization assistance for multiple mobile robots. Two mobile robots were simultaneously navigated in given trajectories using assistance data, successfully.

It is important for an autonomous mobile robot to explore its surroundings in performing the task of localization and navigation. Because of the complexity of the environment, one simple kind of sensors isn't sufficient for mobile robot to accomplish these tasks. The DSP based non-vision sensor data acquisition system selects DSP TMS320LF2407A as its CPU, and integrates with ultrasonic sensors, infrared sensors, position sensitive detectors and a compass. The diversity of sensors can avoid the blind zone and the specular reflection caused by ultrasonic sensors by multi-sensor data fusion. It communicates with PC through serial ports and USB ports. The system has a simple and flexible architecture, low power consumption. The experimental results on a real mobile robot show its reliability and real-time capability.

The construction of a smart autonomous mobile robot system that can operate in an anonymous environment can be difficult. Building an autonomous mobile robot requires collecting data from sensors and cameras in order to recognize the surrounding environment, get knowledge of existing landmarks, and figure out its position and orientation. Many research studies have been carried out in recent years providing algorithms for achieving autonomous motion of mobile robot systems and object detection. The most common platform utilized for robot motion design is ROS (Robot Operating System) and for object detection YOLO (You Only Look Once) is a common choice. Additionally, the autonomous system needs motion planning in a systematic way to avoid obstacles by using LIDAR or other sensing methods generating the feedback signals required for control of motion around occupied spaces. One of the most effective and versatile feedback systems for mobile robot control can be constructed using visual feedback, which relies on a high-resolution camera that processes the image in real-time and the result is fed back to the control system for decision making. Visual feedback can be employed alone without sensors for feedback control of autonomous mobile robots, and it can be used for multiple tasks like path planning, obstacle avoidance, object detection, object recognition in addition to motion control. In this research, results of design and construction of an autonomous mobile rescue robot for finding victims through video data are presented. It is aimed to find victims via applying video as a data collection and feedback generation tool in the autonomous mobile robot control system. The visual feedback and YOLO v3 are used not only for finding victims but also for motion control. Our autonomous mobile robot is designed to move smoothly to the victim's direction and avoids obstacles by using ROS Global Planner. The robot is tested in multiple scenarios in different locations, various obstacle and victim numbers, and satisfactory results with good performances are obtained.

Most path planning approaches (global, reactive, or hybrid) existing in literature don’t consider the transfer of experience concept between agents operating in the same environment. A mobile robot executes any planning method to reach its goal, at the time of navigation, it explores the environment, detects the location of obstacles, makes its calculations to choose the best decisions. All this experience gained by the robot will be wasted, and if a new robot has just joined the environment, it has to repeat the entire planning process without benefiting from past experiences. Our contribution consists in: the use of a Holonic Multi-Agent system for modeling the two abstraction levels of the proposed system, an enhanced version of Ant Colony Optimization is used, where the ants are considered as autonomous and heterogeneous robots’ agents. Each ant in the system executes a distinct planning method to reach its goal, on its return path, it puts some pheromones in its experience memory table, which will be transferred to the master agent which incarnates the collective experiences of all agents that have passed through the platform. The simulation and comparison results have confirmed that using the proposed system, the execution time is significantly decreased and the robot safely achieves its goal.

Research on mobile robots began in the late sixties with the Stanford Research Institute’s pioneering work. Two versions of SHAKEY, an autonomous mobile robot, were built in 1968 and 1971. The main purpose of this project was “to study processes for the realtime control of a robot system that interacts with a complex environment” 〈NIL 69〉. Indeed, mobile robots were and still are a very convenient and powerful support for research on artificial intelligence oriented robotics. They possess the capacity to provide a variety of problems at different levels of generality and difficulty in a large domain including perception, decision making, communication, etc., which all have to be considered within the scope of the specific constraints of robotics: on-line computing, cost considerations, operating ability, and reliability.

This article proposes an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) system based on the artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) for collecting garbage. The proposed system consists of an AMR subsystem, a robot operating system (ROS) robot subsystem, an AI garbage recognition subsystem, solar power supply subsystem, and a smart trash can subsystem. The AMR subsystem uses a motor drive, which is built on an aluminum alloy metal base and is connected to an AI edge computing module via an app, to control the robot. The ROS subsystem is built on an edge computing module, which is coupled with the motor drive module to control the robot arm and the robot gripper, and is connected to the AI edge computing module to control the robot arm through the app. The AI garbage recognition subsystem recognizes the types of waste in real time through an image sensor (camera). This subsystem adopts multiple sensors that can monitor the level of waste in the trash can. Moreover, a map on a web platform locates all trash cans. Servomotors enable automatic opening and closing of the lid to prevent the unpleasant smell of garbage from wafting. A user connects to the AI edge computing module through an app to monitor the robot and control the movement of the robot to any location on the map.

Open Control Architecture for Mobile Robot

We have previously developed a navigation system for autonomous mobile robots. It can find landmarks on the ceiling to move and work. However it is impossible to recognize landmark in case that the size of landmark is different from the size of template. In such cases, the robot cannot continue to work. Therefor we proposed Variable Template Matching (VTM) which makes it possible to recognize landmarks of different sizes. We realize VTM by using the optimization method called Evolution Strategy (ES). The robot can recognize the landmark faster by binary density projection to infer landmark parameters. Minus Fuzzy Template is useful for the robot to avoid misidentifying.

자율이동로봇에 관한 연구, 개발이 활성화되고 있다. 본 논문에서는 목표물 추적 및 목표물 명중을 위해 사격을 할 수 있는 자율이동로봇의 설계 및 제작에 관하여 기술한다. 여기서는 목표물의 이동을 추적할 수 있도록 팬-틸트(pan-tilt)를 제어한다. USB 웹캠(web cam) 영상에서 대상체의 특정을 추출하고, 추출한 특징으로부터 시각구동장치의 이동 위치 및 방향을 결정하기 위한 퍼지논리시스템을 설계한다. 시뮬레이션을 통해 제안한 방법의 유용성을 검증하고, 이를 실제 자율이동로봇의 시각구동장치에 적용하여 타당성을 입증한다. The research and development for autonomous mobile robots has widely been reported. This paper describes a fuzzy logic based visual servoing system for an autonomous mobile robot. An existing system always needs to keep a moving object in overall image. This makes difficult to move the autonomous mobile robot spontaneously. In this paper we first explain an autonomous mobile robot and fuzzy logic system. And then we design a fuzzy logic based visual servoing system. We extract some features of the object from an overall image and then design a fuzzy logic system for controlling the visual servoing system to an exact position. We here introduce a shooting robot that can track an object and hit it. We show that the proposed system presents a desirable performance by a computer simulation and some experiments.

Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) are increasingly important in Industry 4.0 intralogistics but creating path planning systems that adapt to dynamic and uncertain Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS), especially managing conflicts among multiple AMRs with a need for scalable decentralised solutions, remains a significant challenge. This research introduces a dynamic path planning system for AMRs designed for reactive adaptation to FMS disturbances and generalisation across factory layouts, incorporating support for multiple AMRs with integrated conflict avoidance. The system is built on a Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architecture, where software AMR agents independently calculate their paths using a hybrid Genetic Algorithm (GA) that employs Cell-Based Decomposition (CBD) and optimises path length, smoothness, and overlap via a multi-objective fitness function. Multi-AMR conflict avoidance is implemented using the Iterative Exclusion Principle (IEP), which facilitates priority-based planning, knowledge sharing through Predictive Collision Avoidance (PCA), and iterative replanning among agents communicating via a blackboard agent. Verification demonstrated the system’s ability to successfully avoid deadlocks for up to nine AMRs and exhibit good scalability. Validation in a simulated FMS environment confirmed robust adaptation to various disturbances, including static and dynamic obstacles, while maintaining stable run times and consistent path quality. These results affirm the practical feasibility of this hybrid GA and MAS-based approach for dynamic AMR control in complex industrial settings.

This paper presents a design of an autonomous mobile robot system, primarily focuses on hospital environments, which focuses on disinfecting the hospital's isolation ward. This paper also primarily concentrates on making this system cost efficient with minimalistic sensors. This system consists of an advance autonomous indoor navigating mobile robot and a ground station, LIDAR, an UVC disinfectant lamp, encoder motors, IMU, etc. and uses ROS to navigate in indoor autonomously, the hospital environment is a busy environment so this paper equally concentrates on dynamically environment navigation, path planning based on global planner algorithms, localisation and navigation is done using particle filter, dwa_local_planner, navfn. The autonomous mobile robot system has been tested and simulated whose results are reliable and efficient.

The design and implementation of the task control architecture (TCA), a general-purpose framework plus facilities for building and controlling mobile robots, are presented. TCA is designed to support capabilities needed by many autonomous mobile robot systems, including concurrent planning, execution, and perception; reacting to changes in the environment; error recovery; and handling multiple tasks. The facilities that TCA provides for implementing these capabilities, including distributed processing, explicit representation and manipulation of hierarchical plans, concurrent monitoring of selected conditions, and context-dependent exception handling, are described, along with a mobile manipulator that uses the architecture to operate with multiple goals in a dynamic and uncertain environment. TCA has been implemented and is used to run several mobile robot testbeds. >

Autonomous mobile robots operating indoors need to use elevators to move between several floors. However, it is not easy for the robot itself to accurately recognize the current floor. Therefore, this study proposes a system that uses a barometric sensor to estimate the robot's floor position and moves autonomously using an elevator. We confirm that the proposed method enables the robot to accurately identify the floor and move autonomously by real experimental result. In addition, the system was able to accurately identify the floor even after a certain period of time by introducing a system that accurately identifies the floor even if the air pressure changes with time.