Design and manufacturing of a smart mobility platform’s context awareness and path planning module: A PSS approach

Abstract

A smart mobility platform aiding in guidance of disabled people is a concept that can facilitate people’s everyday life. However, design and manufacturing of such a system faces many issues in terms of agility in design, implementation and usability verification. To this end, the concept of Product-Service System (PSS) seems to be the solution; being an emerging concept oriented towards the dematerialisation of the economy, meeting also the requirement of manufacturing industries to cope with the radical changes in the global market. In this study, the development of a context awareness and path planning system under the prism of PSSs is examined. This module is considered to be promoted as a pay per service unit that can be implemented in different operational scenarios and environments. The key objective is to deliver the obstacle avoidance and path planning functionality and add value to the customer, but at the same keep the production lean and flexible. To this end, Round Robin parts are presented, taking into account mounts and jigs for controllers dealing with supervised machine learning techniques and path planning, light-weight system-of-sensors and structural integrity of the module. The concept evaluation is outlined through a case study based on the integration of the system in a smart mobility platform to provide autonomous mobility. The mobility platform is expected to operate within a predefined area, characterized by a complex environment.