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.
Highlights
IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
There are little works on using pavement widths estimation to understand the changes in pavement widths for the reconfiguration of a pavement sweeping robot
Humans were assumed as obstacles in the pavement in all of the experiments, and the robust reconfiguration kinematics of the reconfiguration was performed during locomotion with the input beta left and beta right values from the vision system
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The rise of housing and transportation facilities and infrastructure development in Singapore will create more new communities built, which means more pavement infrastructure. A newer initiative to promote walking and cycling as a mode for transportation in newer estates [1], as well as mature estates [2], will mean that there will be a growth of pavement in Singapore. In the article [3], the Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore indicates that Singapore will continue to add to the existing 200 km network of sheltered walkways and with the continuous development of the Housing Development
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