Introduction
Commercially available hospital as robots are usually expensive for clients due to the use of specialized versatile mobile chassis with multiple support or omnidirectional mechanicum wheels, allowing them to make 360-degrees rotations in spot in a constrained environment. The same is applied for warehouse robots. As an alternative, the cost of such robot could be reduced using a modular approach with a lightweight commercial robot-manipulator mounted on top of a skid-steered 4×4 mobile robot platform, providing very high maneuverability including in-spot 360 degrees rotation. A skid-steered robot can be designed as a simple and robust mobile platform using standard mechatronic modules and sensors, however, its accurate motion control requires employing advanced kinematic/dynamic model based control algorithms, such as NMPC, taking into account the ground surface slippage that can be estimated indirectly using advanced estimation algorithms.
Aims and Objectives
The project aims to develop a novel concept of an autonomous skid-steering based multipurpose mobile-robot-manipulation system for implementing standard warehouse and/or hospital task functionalities, such as object detection and picking operations, e.g. object picking from shelves and drug restocking, satisfying system kinematic and environmental constrains and realizing autonomous robot navigation in human present environment.
Current Results
Preliminary research is done within three graduation/capstone projects completed in 2021.
Autonomous Navigation of a Skid Steering Mobile Robot in Human Present Environment
Mobile Robot Motion Planning and Control with Obstacle Avoidance using Model Predictive Control
Non-GPS Based Mobile Robot Localization using Extended Kalman Filtering