Managing a Fleet of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) using Cloud Robotics Platform

In this paper, we provide details of implementing a system for managing a fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) operating in a factory or a warehouse premise. While the robots are themselves autonomous in its motion and obstacle avoidance capability, the target destination for each robot is provided by a global planner. The global planner and the ground vehicles (robots) constitute a multi agent system (MAS) which communicate with each other over a wireless network. Three different approaches are explored for implementation. The first two approaches make use of the distributed computing based Networked Robotics architecture and communication framework of Robot Operating System (ROS) itself while the third approach uses Rapyuta Cloud Robotics framework for this implementation. The comparative performance of these approaches are analyzed through simulation as well as real world experiment with actual robots. These analyses provide an in-depth understanding of the inner working of the Cloud Robotics Platform in contrast to the usual ROS framework. The insight gained through this exercise will be valuable for students as well as practicing engineers interested in implementing similar systems else where. In the process, we also identify few critical limitations of the current Rapyuta platform and provide suggestions to overcome them.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures, journal pape

Computer implemented system and method for recognizing and counting products within images

The system and method for recognizing and counting products within images is disclosed. The products are recognized by carrying out a nearest-neighbor search in the template feature space using a k-d tree and the product count is then obtained by using a maximum feature repeatability index for each identified feature. The system also obtains product arrangement by fitting bounding boxes around each identified product. The count of boxes thus obtained may also provide the exact number of discrete products visible in an image. A second stage of grid-based search is also carried out in the neighborhood of each detected product to detect new products that might have been missed out in the previous step. This detection is based on a confidence measure including information like histogram matching and spatial location of products. This system is also useful in verifying planogram compliance for a given product

A tea-serving robot for office environment

This paper provides implementation details of a tea-serving robot designed to operate reliably in an office environment where the robot has to move in a restricted space available between the desks. The robot has multiple modes of operation and has several capabilities like following a coloured-line marked on the floor, following a person, detecting hands approaching the tray, detecting an empty tray and avoiding obstacles. The emphasis of this work has been on improving the robustness and reliability of the whole system. A rigorous quantitative performance analysis is carried out to demonstrate the efficacy of the system.</p

A tea-serving robot for office environment

This paper provides implementation details of a tea-serving robot designed to operate reliably in an office environment where the robot has to move in a restricted space available between the desks. The robot has multiple modes of operation and has several capabilities like following a coloured-line marked on the floor, following a person, detecting hands approaching the tray, detecting an empty tray and avoiding obstacles. The emphasis of this work has been on improving the robustness and reliability of the whole system. A rigorous quantitative performance analysis is carried out to demonstrate the efficacy of the system.</p

Product counting using images with application to robot-based retail stock assessment

In this paper, we propose a novel method for obtaining product count directly from images recorded using a monocular camera mounted on a mobile robot. This has application in robot-based retail stock assessment problem where a mobile robot is used for monitoring the stock levels on the shelves of a retail store. The products are recognized by carrying out a nearest-neighbor search in the template feature space using a k-d tree. Unlike current approaches which only provide approximate stock level, we propose a method which can compute the exact number of discrete products visible in a given image. The product count is obtained by fitting bounding box around each product and removing them sequentially from the image. A second stage of grid-based search is carried out in the neighborhood of each detected product to detect new products which were missed out in the previous step. This detection is based on a confidence measure that includes various information such as histogram matching and spatial location. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated through experiments on different datasets obtained using robot camera as well as mobile phone camera. These results show that the robot-based retail stock assessment may become a viable alternative to the currently prevailing manual mode of carrying out these surveys.</p

A novel SURF-based algorithm for tracking a 'Human' in a dynamic environment

Detecting and tracking a human from a mobile robot platform has several applications in service robotics where a robot is expected to assist humans. In this paper, we propose a novel interest point-based algorithm that can track a human reliably under several challenging situations like variation in illumination, pose change, scaling, camera motion and occlusion. The limitations of point-based methods are overcome using colour information and imposing a structure on the colour blobs. Whenever sufficient number of SURF matching points are not available for a given frame, the presence of human is detected using Markov random field based graph matching algorithm. Imposition of structure on coloured blobs helps in eliminating background objects having similar colour distribution. The stability-versus-plasticity dilemma inherent in tracking over long run is resolved by selecting new templates on-line and maintaining a tree of templates which is updated with new information. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated through simulation on standard datasets and the computation time is found to be comparable with existing SURF-based tracking methods.</p

Managing a fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) using cloud robotics platform

In this paper, we provide details of implementing a system for managing a fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) operating in a factory or a warehouse premise. While the robots are themselves autonomous in its motion and obstacle avoidance capability, the target destination for each robot is provided by a global planner. The global planner and the ground vehicles (robots) constitute a multi agent system (MAS) which communicate with each other over a wireless network. Three different approaches are explored for implementation. The first two approaches make use of the distributed computing based Networked Robotics architecture and communication framework of Robot Operating System (ROS) itself while the third approach uses Rapyuta Cloud Robotics framework for this implementation. The comparative performance of these approaches are analyzed through simulation as well as real world experiment with actual robots. These analyses provide an in-depth understanding of the inner working of the Cloud Robotics Platform in contrast to the usual ROS framework. The insight gained through this exercise will be valuable for students as well as practicing engineers interested in implementing similar systems else where. In the process, we also identify few critical limitations of the current Rapyuta platform and provide suggestions to overcome them.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures, journal pape