Reconfiguration During Locomotion by Pavement Sweeping Robot With Feedback Control From Vision System

Abstract

Routine cleaning the pavement is an essential requirement to maintain a sustainable environment for social life. The different width and type of pavements raise the challenges for autonomous vehicles with fixed shape to operate effectively. In this paper, we introduce the vision based reconfiguration of self-reconfigurable pavement sweeping robot called Panthera, which can adjust its frame width to ease the cleaning tasks to become friendly with different pavement geometry. The expansion and compression operations of the Panthera width are implemented by rotating one high torque motor connecting with the lead screw rod to change the opening angle of linkage hinges. The Panthera cleaning and locomotion operations are synchronized with changing the robot width according to the output of detected pavement width. To this end, the segmented pavement leveraged on the masked based deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is used as input for the proposed closed-loop feedback control method, enabling the robot to adjust the requirement of changing the width during locomotion accurately. The proposed PID scheme takes into account the robot kinematic design with the flexibility of width changing modes. The experiments were carried out in real environments demonstrated the autonomous reconfiguration robot width with various locomotion scenarios on pavements of varying width.

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

“…However, there have been little works on pavement sweeping reconfigurable robots and vision perception algorithms for reconfigurable robots to perform locomotion and reconfiguration based on their surroundings. We had previously performed a study [ 29 ] for developing synergy with dynamic changing pavement widths and they are currently working to develop more robust vision perception algorithms to include more scenarios to enable Panthera to be aware of the pedestrian. Although our previous work enables the pavement sweeping reconfigurable robot to adapt to changing pavement widths, it is in a highly constrained situation where there are no pavement users during reconfiguration and that the change in pavement width is symmetrical.…”

Coverage Path Planning for Decomposition Reconfigurable Grid-Maps Using Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Travelling Salesman Problem

“…C OVERAGE Path Planning (CPP) algorithms have been applied to several robotics applications in real-world such as floor-cleaning robots [1], [2], underwater operations [3], agricultural robots [4], tiling robotics [5]- [7], ship hull cleaning [8], benchmarking for inspection [9] and pavement sweeping [10], [11] to name a few. CPP describes an approach designed to determine a path that passes through all the workspace points while avoiding obstacles.…”

Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm-Based Autonomous Path Planning for Hinged-Tetro Reconfigurable Tiling Robot

“…An intra-reconfigurable robot changes its internal morphology without the requirement of external assembly or disassembly [8]. Examples include amphibious robots equipped with eccentric paddle mechanism (ePaddle) that enables versatile locomotion in amphibious environments [9] and pavement sweeping robot Panthera with the robot footprint can change the width to adapt with the working conditions [10], [11], Hornbill with reconfigurable manipulators [12] . An inter-reconfigurable robot consists of a congregation of homogeneous or heterogeneous modules and forms a variety of morphologies through assembly and disassembly process.…”