Abstract:
This paper presents an office assistant robot that can
be used in an unstructured indoor office environment. Among
many technologies available, we used free and open source
software and inexpensive sensors and materials to build the low
cost but accurate robot. Robotic Operating System (ROS) indigo
was used as the ground operating system on Ubuntu 14.04. The
mobile robot, iRobot Create 2 was used as the basic robot and
a structure was built to carry a mini-laptop and PrimeSense 3D
vision sensor. A workstation computer was used as the central
location PC which was kept still and map of office environment
is built on it. User is able to give commands to the system via
voice and virtual keys by the developed Android application
(App). These three units, mobile robot, central workstation and
Android devices, communicates through a Wi-Fi connection. The
proposed robot could deliver documents or parcels in between
office members according to the user commands. We allowed the
robot to navigate autonomously and randomly between users and
monitored its accuracy by looking at the completion of the route
to a target user. Results show that the office assistant delivery
robot has above 92% of accuracy in delivery process for a valid
user input.
