Design of a Telepresence Robot to Avoid Obstacles in IoT-Enabled Sustainable Healthcare Systems

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, telepresence robots (TRs) are increasingly a part of healthcare, academia, and industry due to their enormous benefits. IoT provides a sensor-based environment in which robots receive more precise information about their surroundings. The researchers work day and night to reduce cost, duration, and complexity in all application areas. It provides tremendous benefits, such as sustainability, welfare improvement, cost-effectiveness, user-friendliness, and adaptability. However, it faces many challenges in making critical decisions during motion, which requires a long training period and intelligent motion planning. These include obstacle avoidance during movement, intelligent control in hazardous situations, and ensuring the right measurements. Following up on these issues requires a sophisticated control design and a secure communication link. This paper proposes a control design to normalize the integration process and offer an auto-MERLIN robot with cognitive and sustainable architecture. A control design is proposed through system identification and modeling of the robot. The robot control design was evaluated, and a prototype was prepared for testing in a hazardous environment. The robot was tested by considering various parameters: driving straight ahead, turning right, self-localizing, and receiving commands from a remote location. The maneuverability, controllability, and stability results show that the proposed design is well-developed and cost-efficient, with a fast response time. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly minimizes the obstacle collisions. The results confirm the employability and sustainability of the proposed design and demonstrate auto-MERLIN’s capabilities as a sustainable robot ready to be deployed in highly interactive scenarios.