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. 2021 Mar 3;21(5):1745.
doi: 10.3390/s21051745.

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

Lim Yi  1 , Anh Vu Le  1   2 , Balakrishnan Ramalingam  1 , Abdullah Aamir Hayat  1 , Mohan Rajesh Elara  1 , Tran Hoang Quang Minh  2 , Braulio Félix Gómez  1 , Lum Kai Wen  1
Affiliations

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

Lim Yi et al. Sensors (Basel). .

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.

Keywords: feedback control; pavement cleaning; reconfigurable robot; reconfiguration mechanism design; semantic segmentation deep neural network; sensors fusion.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Common scenarios encountered by pavement sweeping vehicles.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Panthera reconfiguration to avoid pedestrian while cleaning pavement.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Panthera Body Structure.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Differential Drive Steering Units.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Electrical Layout.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Reconfiguration Constrain.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Panthera system architecture.
Figure 8
Figure 8
The block diagram of vision-based reconfigurable mechanism.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Panthera vision feedback adapting to pavement change concept.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Pavement edge detection using semantic segmentation for two sections.
Figure 11
Figure 11
Panthera feeback to avoid pedestrians while adapting to pavement change concept.
Figure 12
Figure 12
Panthera feedback to avoid pedestrians while adapting to pavement change.
Figure 13
Figure 13
Control Model Layout.
Figure 14
Figure 14
Robot reference frame.
Figure 15
Figure 15
Common instantaneous center of rotation (ICR) of the four steering units.
Figure 16
Figure 16
Panthera gaits for reconfiguration during locomotion.
Figure 17
Figure 17
Panthera platform parallel to pavement.
Figure 18
Figure 18
Reconfiguration during locomotion where central beam moves along the y direction in the robot reference frame.
Figure 19
Figure 19
Pedestrian on the left of Panthera.
Figure 20
Figure 20
Pedestrian depth against time.
Figure 21
Figure 21
Experimental results for first experiment.
Figure 22
Figure 22
The experimental results for second experiment.
Figure 23
Figure 23
Experimental results for third experiment.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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