An integrated design towards the implementation of an autonomous mobile robot

This paper details the design and implementation of a wheeled mobile robot, which will be referred to as Mobius (Mobile Vision Autonomous System), for selfsustained indoor operation. Its rugged design enables it to be easily customised with auxiliary equipment providing a wide application base. This is facilitated by an accurately controlled high power drive system, with onboard power and computational sources, giving much improved performances and capabilities comparable to that of commercially available devices in the same price bracket. The mechanical and electrical design of the robot are presented, optimised for cost and performance. The remainder of the paper concentrates on the design and implementation of an accurate drive controlle

Path Planning Usage for Autonomous Agents

In order to achieve the wide range of the robotic application it is necessary to provide iterative motions among points of the goals. For instance, in the industry mobile robots can replace any components between a storehouse and an assembly department. Ammunition replacement is widely used in military services. Working place is possible in ports, airports, waste site and etc. Mobile agents can be used for monitoring if it is necessary to observe control points in the secret place. The paper deals with path planning programme for mobile robots. The aim of the research paper is to analyse motion-planning algorithms that contain the design of modelling programme. The programme is needed as environment modelling to obtain the simulation data. The simulation data give the possibility to conduct the wide analyses for selected algorithm. Analysis means the simulation data interpretation and comparison with other data obtained using the motion-planning. The results of the careful analysis were considered for optimal path planning algorithms. The experimental evidence was proposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm for steady covered space. The results described in this work can be extended in a number of directions, and applied to other algorithms

Remote control on Internet,long distance experiment of remote practice works, measurements and results

This paper is protected under copyright by Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. Single photocopies may be made for personal use as allowed by national copyright laws. Permission of the Publisher and payment of a fee is required for all other photocopying, including multiple or systematic copying, copying for advertising or promotional purposes, resale and all forms of document delivery. Permission may be sought directly from Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. at the e-mail address: [email protected] Except as outlined above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the Publisher. E-mail address permission request: [email protected] audienceThe aim of our work is to control remotely mechanical systems which have nowadays local controls. With the development of the e-technologies, improvement of the network in term of time and band-width, the remote control will be common and will be made using networks without true quality of service, even unpredictable like Internet. In a first part of this paper, we are presenting some existing applications we have used. In a second part, we are describing generic software architecture to realize such remote control and a methodology to take into account the unpredictable nature of the communication media. In the third part we present experimental results of long distance remote control

Multi-Sensor Mobile Robot Localization For Diverse Environments

Mobile robot localization with different sensors and algorithms is a widely studied problem, and there have been many approaches proposed, with considerable degrees of success. However, every sensor and algorithm has limitations, due to which we believe no single localization algorithm can be “perfect,” or universally applicable to all situations. Laser rangefinders are commonly used for localization, and state-of-theart algorithms are capable of achieving sub-centimeter accuracy in environments with features observable by laser rangefinders. Unfortunately, in large scale environments, there are bound to be areas devoid of features visible by a laser rangefinder, like open atria or corridors with glass walls. In such situations, the error in localization estimates using laser rangefinders could grow in an unbounded manner. Localization algorithms that use depth cameras, like the Microsoft Kinect sensor, have similar characteristics. WiFi signal strength based algorithms, on the other hand, are applicable anywhere there is dense WiFi coverage, and have bounded errors. Although the minimum error of WiFi based localization may be greater than that of laser rangefinder or depth camera based localization, the maximum error of WiFi based localization is bounded and less than that of the other algorithms. Hence, in our work, we analyze the strengths of localization using all three sensors - using a laser rangefinder, a depth camera, and using WiFi. We identify sensors that are most accurate at localization for different locations on the map. The mobile robot could then, for example, rely on WiFi localization more in open areas or areas with glass walls, and laser rangefinder and depth camera based localization in corridor and office environments

Plan Projection, Execution, and Learning for Mobile Robot Control

Most state-of-the-art hybrid control systems for mobile robots are decomposed into different layers. While the deliberation layer reasons about the actions required for the robot in order to achieve a given goal, the behavioral layer is designed to enable the robot to quickly react to unforeseen events. This decomposition guarantees a safe operation even in the presence of unforeseen and dynamic obstacles and enables the robot to cope with situations it was not explicitly programmed for. The layered design, however, also leaves us with the problem of plan execution. The problem of plan execution is the problem of arbitrating between the deliberation- and the behavioral layer. Abstract symbolic actions have to be translated into streams of local control commands. Simultaneously, execution failures have to be handled on an appropriate level of abstraction. It is now widely accepted that plan execution should form a third layer of a hybrid robot control system. The resulting layered architectures are called three-tiered architectures, or 3T architectures for short. Although many high level programming frameworks have been proposed to support the implementation of the intermediate layer, there is no generally accepted algorithmic basis for plan execution in three-tiered architectures. In this thesis, we propose to base plan execution on plan projection and learning and present a general framework for the self-supervised improvement of plan execution. This framework has been implemented in APPEAL, an Architecture for Plan Projection, Execution And Learning, which extends the well known RHINO control system by introducing an execution layer. This thesis contributes to the field of plan-based mobile robot control which investigates the interrelation between planning, reasoning, and learning techniques based on an explicit representation of the robot's intended course of action, a plan. In McDermott's terminology, a plan is that part of a robot control program, which the robot cannot only execute, but also reason about and manipulate. According to that broad view, a plan may serve many purposes in a robot control system like reasoning about future behavior, the revision of intended activities, or learning. In this thesis, plan-based control is applied to the self-supervised improvement of mobile robot plan execution

Robotic Architectures

In the development of mobile robotic systems, a robotic architecture plays a crucial role in interconnecting all the sub-systems and controlling the system. The design of robotic architectures for mobile autonomous robots is a challenging and complex task. With a number of existing architectures and tools to choose from, a review of the existing robotic architecture is essential. This paper surveys the different paradigms in robotic architectures. A classification of the existing robotic architectures and comparison of different proposals attributes and properties have been carried out. The paper also provides a view on the current state of designing robot architectures. It also proposes a conceptual model of a generalised robotic architecture for mobile autonomous robots.Defence Science Journal, 2010, 60(1), pp.15-22, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.60.9

A Study on Learning Social Robot Navigation with Multimodal Perception

Autonomous mobile robots need to perceive the environments with their onboard sensors (e.g., LiDARs and RGB cameras) and then make appropriate navigation decisions. In order to navigate human-inhabited public spaces, such a navigation task becomes more than only obstacle avoidance, but also requires considering surrounding humans and their intentions to somewhat change the navigation behavior in response to the underlying social norms, i.e., being socially compliant. Machine learning methods are shown to be effective in capturing those complex and subtle social interactions in a data-driven manner, without explicitly hand-crafting simplified models or cost functions. Considering multiple available sensor modalities and the efficiency of learning methods, this paper presents a comprehensive study on learning social robot navigation with multimodal perception using a large-scale real-world dataset. The study investigates social robot navigation decision making on both the global and local planning levels and contrasts unimodal and multimodal learning against a set of classical navigation approaches in different social scenarios, while also analyzing the training and generalizability performance from the learning perspective. We also conduct a human study on how learning with multimodal perception affects the perceived social compliance. The results show that multimodal learning has a clear advantage over unimodal learning in both dataset and human studies. We open-source our code for the community's future use to study multimodal perception for learning social robot navigation