Service Robot Design for Uses in Human Centered Environments

This paper presents the development of a service robot platform for various assistive tasks in human-centered environment. The main design objective is to enable the robot to safely navigate indoor areas and to provide cross-platform accessibility to human-users. To accomplish the goal, two technical design requirements which include the rough-terrain locomotive mechanism and the web-server based operating system are addressed and explored in this study. First, the overall control system architecture of the robot which consists of three different layers (human-interaction, environment-interaction and movement) is presented. Then, the mechanical and electronic specification of the robot’s dual drive system and the power management system are described with their design process. The robot’s software platform (which consists of the server, client and real time controller) is also provided for the selected service task. Last, the built platform is tested and evaluated through experimentations in the real world settings.