A novel visible light communication system for enhanced control of autonomous delivery robots in a hospital

Abstract

Control systems for Autonomous mobile delivery robots have been described before. However, the control they provide is limited, leaving potential for serious errors. The current mobile robot systems concentrate on position accuracy and operational function but leave open management of safety hazards such as entering the dangerous and not intended areas as stairway. In order to increase the safety of the robot, it is as important to work with sensors installed in the external environment as the sensors installed on the robot. For this purpose, visible light communication (VLC) is a promising device to be used with the robot system. VLC creates an in-house GPS system by installing special LED lights that can replace standard lighting in key locations in the hospital. We have developed an in-hospital transportation robot, called HOSPI in which the control system has been enhanced by combining the navigational sensors of the robot and a VLC using installed lighting in the building. By using VLC, robots can obtain more information about the environment. As the first step for the practical application of VLC to robot system, we use VLC to overcome problems in conventional localization approaches, and to provide an additional line of defense in the case of catastrophic failures. This paper also describes experimental and actual operational results in detail of robots equipped, in an actual hospital, with the described process.

Improving Radio Energy Harvesting in Robots Using Mobility Diversity

“…In this article, we consider a MR and in particular we assume a differential drive robot 3 (DDR) [25] furnished with a rectifier antenna 4 (rectenna) [19]. It is assumed that the rectenna is installed on the geometric center of the robot (see 3 Although we restrict our analysis to a DDR the technique presented in this article can be easily extended to other types of MR like (for example) a three wheeled omni-directional robot [23] which uses the model in [24].…”

“…It is assumed that the rectenna is installed on the geometric center of the robot (see 3 Although we restrict our analysis to a DDR the technique presented in this article can be easily extended to other types of MR like (for example) a three wheeled omni-directional robot [23] which uses the model in [24]. 4 An antenna which is connected directly to a rectifier composed of a Schottky diode and a lowpass filter. This kind of antenna is used in practical energy harvesting systems [26].…”

“…Nevertheless, performing this exploration demands significant mobility which comes at the expense of mechanical energy consumption, see (4). This mechanical energy consumption in turn depletes the energy from the MR's battery.…”

“…This can be attributed to the associated wide spectrum of applications (e.g. health care [4], rescue [5], [6], [7], construction [8], exploration [9], surveillance [10] and entertainment [11] among many others) as well as its interdisciplinary nature involving communications [12], [13], [14], control and embedded systems.…”

Infrared and visible links for medical body sensor networks

“…Indeed, the use of RF technologies around the human body can be problematic in terms of impact on health, security and confidentiality. Therefore, OWC technology can be a solution to provide low cost, efficient and safe communications for medical devices, between medical equipment or between patients and monitoring stations [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10].…”