Abstract
Periodic cleaning of all frequently touched social areas such as walls, doors, locks, handles, windows has become the first line of defense against all infectious diseases. Among those, cleaning of large wall areas manually is always tedious, time-consuming, and astounding task. Although numerous cleaning companies are interested in deploying robotic cleaning solutions, they are mostly not addressing wall cleaning. To this end, we are proposing a new vision-based wall following framework that acts as an add-on for any professional robotic platform to perform wall cleaning. The proposed framework uses Deep Learning (DL) framework to visually detect, classify, and segment the wall/floor surface and instructs the robot to wall follow to execute the cleaning task. Also, we summarized the system architecture of Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR), which has been used as our testing platform. We evaluated the performance of the proposed framework on HSR robot under various defined scenarios. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed framework could successfully classify and segment the wall/floor surface and also detect the obstacle on wall and floor with high detection accuracy and demonstrates a robust behavior of wall following.
Highlights
Cleaning of high-touch areas in a physical environment is very critical in preventing the spread of infectious diseases
The experiment was designed with three steps: data-set preparation and training the deep learning frameworks, evaluating the trained model in offline using indoor data-sets and testing with Human Support Robot (HSR) robot platform
The segmentation model performance was evaluated with pixel classification accuracy, Intersection Over Union (IoU) and F1 score metrics [19] and obstacle detection model was assessed through precision (Equation (5)), recall (Equation (6)) and F1 score metrics (Equation (7))
Summary
Cleaning of high-touch areas in a physical environment is very critical in preventing the spread of infectious diseases. The frequently touched areas that include walls, doors, locks, handles, windows need to be cleaned within a fixed time interval. During the period of spread, there is a high possibility and risk where a human cleaner may get infected. To overcome such bottlenecks, and to reduce the risk of infection transmission, the cleaning contractors are encouraged to use robotic solutions by every developed nation. The use of robotic cleaners for professional cleaning services has been increased gradually in the past few years. In the past two decades, numerous wall cleaning robots were researched with the wall climbing capability
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