Assistive Delivery Robot Application for Real-World Postal Services

This paper introduces a robot system that is designed to assist postal workers by carrying heavy packages in a complex urban environment such as apartment complex. Since most of such areas do not have access to reliable GPS signal reception, we propose a 3-D point cloud map based matching localizati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2021, Vol.9, p.141981-141998
Main Authors: Lee, Daegyu, Kang, Gyuree, Kim, Boseong, Shim, D. Hyunchul
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
delivery robot
Delivery services
Electronic devices
human–robot cooperation
Laser radar
Location awareness
Matching
Mobile robots
Obstacle avoidance
Perception-based visual servoing
Postal employees
Postal services
Postal workers
Prediction algorithms
Robot kinematics
Robot sensing systems
Robots
Signal reception
Three dimensional models
Urban environments
Visual control
Visual perception driven algorithms
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Summary:This paper introduces a robot system that is designed to assist postal workers by carrying heavy packages in a complex urban environment such as apartment complex. Since most of such areas do not have access to reliable GPS signal reception, we propose a 3-D point cloud map based matching localization with robust position estimation along with a perception-based visual servoing algorithm. The delivery robot is also designed to communicate with the control center so that the operator can monitor the current and past situation using onboard videos, obstacle information, and emergency stop logs. Also, the postal worker can choose between autonomous driving mode and follow-me mode using his/her mobile device. To validate the performance of the proposed robot system, we collaborated with full-time postal workers performing their actual delivery services for more than four weeks to collect the field operation data. Using this data, we were able to confirm that the proposed map-matching algorithm performs well in various environments where the robot could navigate with reliable position accuracy and obstacle avoidance capability.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3120618