Social Distancing Robot (11.00hr)

Project description

The main question of our project is how can we implement behavior on our robot, so that it can autonomously deliver orders to the customer in safe manner, in order to decrease physical contact between employee and customers, while maintaining the social distancing in the catering industry?

Our greatest challenge was the size of the project. We are only the second of four stages for this project and work on only a single facet of it. The communication with other groups and individual experts was not always as smooth as we hoped.

Context

People who encounter many others are potential super spreaders of the corona virus. Examples we think of are people who deliver orders in a restaurant or on a terrace, or who distribute meals in a hospital or nursing homes.

These are tasks that a robot (AGV) could take over perfectly well. However, existing AGVs are very expensive for these types of applications and generally require a high-level technological infrastructure, and specialist personnel.

So, 2 people from different departments of Fontys came with the plan to develop a cheaper version of an AGV that could follow simple preplanned routes, avoid obstacles and have basic interaction with people. After speaking with several partner companies and working out their concepts they approached Fontys HTSM (High Tech System and Materials) with their plans. After some consideration it was decided to merge the 2 concepts in a single project.

The first stage of the project was finished in the autumn of 2020. This part went about creating a real concept design of how the robot should look, what laws should be reviewed and taken into consideration, how the robot should best interact with people and lastly what hardware was needed and how the robot should be built.

The second stage of the project is now ending. This was the technical phase that builds the actual robot, that tries to create a first prototype and looks if the hardware can be integrated into a single whole.

Results

We as a project group managed the following things:

• We Integrated a talking skeleton between ROS nodes on the Jetson TX2 board to test the hardware of the robot’s brain.
• After a small setback at the end, we found and implemented navigation algorithms and created a working simulation demo of the robot.
• We communicated with other groups that where part of the bigger project to hash out details for robot-human interaction and integrated them in the development of interfaces between robot, software and app.
• The creation of a research document about the hardware, ROS navigation of the robot and robot behavior.
• A design document with descriptions and diagrams that will explains the software architecture of the robot and how the communication between all different parts and levels of the hardware will work.

At the end we took the project from level 3 to level 4 of its Technological Readiness level. That means that we took the project from a PoC simulation to taking a step towards hardware integration.

About the project group

Our group has good chemistry and is very open with communication towards each other. During the last Semester (18 Weeks) we learned our individual strengths and the way we work the most effective. Our group has good chemistry and is very open with communication towards each other.

For this project we primarily use Scrum and during the 2 days a week we work on this project we keep a flexible schedule. In the morning we hold a Stand-Up where everyone chooses a task, and in the afternoon, we hold a Stand-Down to inform the group of any progress or possible problems. All this together kept our group flexible and able to adapt to sudden changes.