Abstract
This work presents a table cleaning and inspection method using a Human Support Robot (HSR) which can operate in a typical food court setting. The HSR is able to perform a cleanliness inspection and also clean the food litter on the table by implementing a deep learning technique and planner framework. A lightweight Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) has been proposed to recognize the food litter on top of the table. In addition, the planner framework was proposed to HSR for accomplishing the table cleaning task which generates the cleaning path according to the detection of food litter and then the cleaning action is carried out. The effectiveness of the food litter detection module is verified with the cleanliness inspection task using Toyota HSR, and its detection results are verified with standard quality metrics. The experimental results show that the food litter detection module achieves an average of detection accuracy, which is more suitable for deploying the HSR robots for performing the cleanliness inspection and also helps to select the different cleaning modes. Further, the planner part has been tested through the table cleaning tasks. The experimental results show that the planner generated the cleaning path in real time and its generated path is optimal which reduces the cleaning time by grouping based cleaning action for removing the food litters from the table.
Highlights
Due to long working hours, low wages, unwillingness to work as a cleaner, workforce shortage has been a constant problem for food court cleaning and maintenance tasks in recent times [1].Recently, many robotic platforms are designed for different cleaning application which include floor cleaning [2,3], facade cleaning [4], staircase cleaning [5], pavement cleaning [6,7] and garden cleaning [8]
This proposed cleaning platform Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR) is developed for assisting humans in a general setting, and proven to be efficient in conventional environments
The proposed framework is tested on a common food-court like setting so that the real-world implementation can be without any issues
Summary
Due to long working hours, low wages, unwillingness to work as a cleaner, workforce shortage has been a constant problem for food court cleaning and maintenance tasks in recent times [1]. Hass et al, demonstrated the use of unsupervised clustering algorithm and Markov Decision Problem (MDP) for performing the cleaning task where unsupervised clustering algorithm is used to distinguish the dirt from surface and MDP algorithm is used to generate the maps, and transition model from clustered image is used to describe the robot cleaning action [18] These approaches have some practical issues and disadvantages for using in food court table cleaning; the detection ratio relies heavily on the textured surfaces, which makes it challenging to identify the litter type as solid or stain or liquid spillage [12,20,21]. Motivated by the works mentioned above, this work proposes the deep learning-based food litter detection system and a path planner algorithm for the Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR) [10,32] to accomplish the table cleaning and inspection task for the standard food court setting.
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