Efficient Office Assistant Robot System: Autonomous Navigation and Controlling Based on ROS

Abstract

This paper proposes a movable robot that can be used to deliver documents or small parcels (>2.0kg) between employees of an unstructured indoor office environment. The study reviews literature on robot navigation, apply promising techniques and test their accuracy in an unstructured indoor laboratory environment. There are many technologies available in robot navigation. We have selected free and open source software and inexpensive sensors and materials to build a low cost but accurate robot. Our system comprised of three units: first one that process sensor data, second one which is the navigating robot having sensors and actuators, and third one controlling part of office assistant robot system. We have used Robotic Operating System (ROS) indigo as the ground operating system in the background of Ubuntu Operating System. The experiment was conducted to examine the capabilities of the setup and studied its behavior, mapping and localization specifically according to the user commands. An unstructured indoor environment was selected with five users located on the sides. We considered both dark (55 lux – 60 lux) and bright (15 lux – 20 lux) illumination conditions in the room. Then, we allowed the robot to navigate autonomously according to the user commands between five users and monitored its accuracy by looking at the completion of the route to a target user. Results show that the robot has about 98.4% of accuracy of achieving the goal location on average in both lighting conditions and 98% and 98.8% of accuracies for bright and dark conditions respectively. Finally, this office assistant robot system could be practically used in an office environment in both bright and dark lighting conditions.