Development of autonomously mobile robot with control system connected by TCP/IP network

Robotics is a scientific discipline which includes the operation and development of robots and other fields of computer science, as well as electrical and mechanical engineering and high-performance modular control systems. This paper reports the first results of a research project that uses a previously developed MES - Modular Electronic System for autonomous mobile robots and for developing robots to use the MES in other scientific applications. This approach offers the ability to build a scalable and flexible control system with only a few modules. A novel feature of our approach is its modular integration of electronics with the ability to multitask, which can be adapted for particular applications. We demonstrate the robustness of this approach in controlling an indoor mobile robot for the EUROBOT 2009 and 2010.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Open Control Architecture for Mobile Robot

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.

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.

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.

In recent years, most of the research about autonomous mobile robotics is focused on obstacle detection and path planning in unknown environments. Improved accuracy in environment recognition and high precision in robot control can ensure feasibility of intelligent and autonomous mobile robotic systems in unexplored environments. To reach this goal, effective navigation and control approaches for the mobile robots must be proposed. This paper presents a path planning approach based on the navigation map reconstructed by a scout robot equipped with an onboard camera using VSLAM (visual simultaneous localization and mapping) algorithm. In the region where surveillance cameras can see blind robots equipped with no onboard cameras, these blind robots can be driven to follow the desired trajectories and reach their goal positions by the proposed visual servo control law. The proposed navigation and control system has been validated by experimenting with a blind robot using available real-time vision from the surveillance cameras.

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.

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.

In this paper, we describe a basic sensing system for self-diagnosing an autonomous mobile robot. In recent years, many researches on intelligent robots and systems have been done. But, when such robots and systems work in the real environment, it is important for those robots and systems to have the ability to recognize their own conditions for detecting faults. On the point of view, we should consider pay more attention to diagnose in such intelligent systems. Therefore we try to construct an internal sensing system as a self-diagnosis system on a real robot. Especially, in this paper, we discuss about motor system of an autonomous omnidirectional mobile robot, which was developed in RIKEN. The self-diagnosis system consists of multiple sensors, which are voltage, current, encoder, and magnetic sensors. We show some diagnosing experimental results using the real system. From the results, we could collect basic data for fault detection of the system.

In the control of autonomous mobile robots there exist two types of control: global control and local control. The requirement to solve global and local tasks arises respectively. This chapter concentrates on local tasks and shows that robots can learn to cope with some local tasks within minutes. The main idea of the chapter is to show that, while creating intelligent control systems for autonomous mobile robots, the beginning is most important as we have to transfer as much as possible human knowledge and human expert-operator skills into the intelligent control system. Successful transfer ensures fast and good results. One of the most advanced techniques in robotics is an autonomous mobile robot on-line learning from the experts’ demonstrations. Further, the latter technique is briefly described in this chapter. As an example of local task the wall following is taken. The main goal of our experiment is to teach the autonomous mobile robot within 10 minutes to follow the wall of the maze as fast and as precisely as it is possible. This task also can be transformed to the obstacle circuit on the left or on the right. The main part of the suggested control system is a small Feed-Forward Artificial Neural Network. In some particular cases – critical situations – “If-Then” rules undertake the control, but our goal is to minimize possibility that these rules would start controlling the robot. The aim of the experiment is to implement the proposed technique on the real robot. This technique enables to reach desirable capabilities in control much faster than they would be reached using Evolutionary or Genetic Algorithms, or trying to create the control systems by hand using “If-Then” rules or Fuzzy Logic. In order to evaluate the quality of the intelligent control system to control an autonomous mobile robot we calculate objective function values and the percentage of the robot work loops when “If-Then” rules control the robot.