Field Robot Supporting the Activities of a Household Appliances Laboratory

Abstract

The development of a field robot for diagnosis and testing in the production line and laboratories (e.g., life test labs) of household appliances is considered. The proposed system targets the repetitive task of taking numerous measurements on products in order to guarantee a standardized and repeatable quality control. In this solution the diagnosis and testing station is not a fixed system but a flexible one, based on mobile robot with sensory and diagnostic skills. Such system achieves high flexibility own to its mobile nature and cost reduction due to the reduction in the number of measurement devices. The system can be interconnected with surrounding production and test systems to provide relevant feedback information for an integrated production and measurement process. This paper focuses on the aspects related with autonomous mobile platform development. A navigation module has been developed to guarantee the reliable performance in an indoor highly structured environment with position uncertainties of devices to be tested. A localization procedure has been integrated in the navigation module making use of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Preliminary tests show the feasibility of the proposed solution for the considered field application