Locomotion with Pedestrian Aware from Perception Sensor by Pavement Sweeping Reconfigurable Robot

Abstract

Regular washing of public pavements is necessary to ensure that the public environment is sanitary for social activities. This is a challenge for autonomous cleaning robots, as they must adapt to the environment with varying pavement widths while avoiding pedestrians. A self-reconfigurable pavement sweeping robot, named Panthera, has the mechanisms to perform reconfiguration in width to enable smooth cleaning operations, and it changes its behavior based on environment dynamics of moving pedestrians and changing pavement widths. Reconfiguration in the robot’s width is possible, due to the scissor mechanism at the core of the robot’s body, which is driven by a lead screw motor. Panthera will perform locomotion and reconfiguration based on perception sensors feedback control proposed while using an Red Green Blue-D (RGB-D) camera. The proposed control scheme involves publishing robot kinematic parameters for reconfiguration during locomotion. Experiments were conducted in outdoor pavements to demonstrate the autonomous reconfiguration during locomotion to avoid pedestrians while complying with varying pavements widths in a real-world scenario.

Hybrid Path Planning Model for Multiple Robots Considering Obstacle Avoidance

“…The repulsive force component of the robot subjected to the n obstacle in the x and y coordinate axis directions can be expressed as Equation (11).…”

“…The goal of path planning for mobile robots is to find collision-free paths from the starting point to the target point and to optimize them according to certain criteria. For example, sidewalk sweeping robots operate in dynamic environments [10] with moving pedestrians and objects, and the requirement for accurate execution of autonomous tasks in uncertain environments is crucial for the development of the next pair of robots [11]. Some methods are based on statistical optimization strategies such as A * [12], ant colony algorithms, and genetic algorithms.…”

Adaptive Floor Cleaning Strategy by Human Density Surveillance Mapping with a Reconfigurable Multi-Purpose Service Robot

“…To measure each detected human's depth distance, an area of 10 × 10 from the center position of the neck is cropped, and the average of the depth from each of the corresponding pixels of the cropped region is calculated. This average depth distance d o is calculated from the Equation (11).…”

“…These adhesion techniques have greater flexibility in controlling the adhesion force exerted on the surface by varying the power supply. Leveraging on the idea of self reconfigurable design mechanisms have been widely explored in-floor cleaning [ 8 ], ship hull cleaning maintenance [ 9 , 10 ], staircase cleaning [ 11 ], and pavement cleaning [ 12 ]. hTetro robot in Reference [ 8 ] is a vacuum cleaning autonomous robot that can reconfigure its morphology to access narrow regions that cannot be reached by standard fixed-shaped vacuum cleaning robots.…”

Path Planning for Reconfigurable hTetro Robot Combining Heat Conduction-Based and Discrete Optimization

“…Furthermore, mobile robots commonly 173 operate in complex and dynamic environments rather than 174 in predefined ones. For instance, a pavement sweeping 175 robot operates in a dynamic environment with moving 176 pedestrians, and objects [44], [45], [46]. The requirement 177 of implementing precisely autonomous tasks in uncer-178 tain environments is crucial for the development of next-179 generation robots.…”