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Development of an Autonomous Mobile Towing Vehicle for Logistic Tasks

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Robot 2019: Fourth Iberian Robotics Conference (ROBOT 2019)

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Abstract

Frequently carrying high loads and performing repetitive tasks compromises the ergonomics of individuals, a recurrent scenario in hospital environments. In this paper, we design a logistic planner of a fleet of autonomous mobile robots for the automation of transporting trolleys around the hospital, which is independent of the space configuration, and robust to loss of network and deadlocks. Our robotic solution has an innovative gripping system capable of grasping and pulling non-modified standard trolleys just by coupling a plate. Robots are able to navigate autonomously, to avoid obstacles assuring the safety of operators, to identify and dock a trolley, to access charging stations and elevators, and to communicate with the latter. An interface was built allowing users to command the robots through a web server. It is shown how the proposed methodology behaves in experiments conducted at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto and Braga’s Hospital.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.djangoproject.com/.

  2. 2.

    http://wiki.ros.org/actionlib.

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Acknowledgements

This work is financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme, and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project SAICTPAC/0034/2015- POCI-01- 0145-FEDER-016418.

Authors would like to acknowledge to Trivalor, Itau and Gertal for the support of the project RDH.

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Correspondence to José Lima .

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Rocha, C. et al. (2020). Development of an Autonomous Mobile Towing Vehicle for Logistic Tasks. In: Silva, M., Luís Lima, J., Reis, L., Sanfeliu, A., Tardioli, D. (eds) Robot 2019: Fourth Iberian Robotics Conference. ROBOT 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1092. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35990-4_54

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