Design and implementation of a navigation system in a robotic platform and characterization of the service robots capabilities

Abstract

In the present work, the design and implementation of a navigation system in a service robot as well as the characterization of the capabilities are explored as well in an application-case for public health monitoring is developed and explained in detail using fundamental blocks to compose a big system. Currently, (2022) service robotics is an emergent field to the point that even the basic definition of service robots is still an open problem, but the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated those developments in the technical sense; therefore this work contributes to that tendency providing what are the fundamental layers of a service robot hoping to inspire and help to develop a methodological framework to develop and evaluate similar systems. For this work, the goal to achieve was to develop and test a robotic system as a surveillance system for the COVID-19 spread and extend robots studied and developed for manufacturing facilities such as Autonomous Guided Vehicles into an urban environment. The basic methodology is composed by identification of literature and technological stack then, propose the structure and components of such a robotic system as a service robot in order to decompose the problem into sub-problems that maps into a technological conceptual layer of the service robots to finally chose and develop a set of functional blocks as a feasible solution based on some rationale. The last step is to test the layers of the robot using a set of experiments representatives to quantify the performance for further improvements. Among the results, it is important to say that the development presented here gathered a considerable amount of market value, and it was exposed in several forums. The evaluation of the system, at the end, reach a 70% of precision detecting face mask misuse and the navigation from point to point exhibits a precision of 0.2 centimeters. The implications of this research are a contribution to the state of the technique in terms of a new patent being developed for the system and contributions to the framework of service robotics in a conceptual sense, proposing a set of performance metrics and fundamental blocks needed in similar systems and studies. Finally, this work can encourage new developments in the area by the research group using this work as a baseline to attack more complicated problems without the necessity of enabling a new robotic platform for research.