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

• Main Authors: Lim Yi, Anh Vu Le, Balakrishnan Ramalingam, Abdullah Aamir Hayat, Mohan Rajesh Elara, Tran Hoang Quang Minh, Braulio Félix Gómez, Lum Kai Wen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-03-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: reconfigurable robot; sensors fusion; pavement cleaning; reconfiguration mechanism design; semantic segmentation deep neural network; feedback control
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/5/1745

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.