Project
| # | Title | Team Members | TA | Documents | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 59 | Autonomous Indoor Food Delivery Robot |
Belen Castellote Lopez Ignacio Ampuero Gonzalez Nishqa Sharma |
Weihang Liang | design_document1.docx design_document2.pdf design_document3.docx design_document4.pdf final_paper1.pdf proposal3.docx proposal1.docx proposal2.docx |
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| **1. Team Members:** Nishqa Sharma (nsharm13), Belen Castellote Lopez (cbelen2), Ignacio Ampuero Gonzalez (ignacio8) **2. Problem:** We want to create a robot that can pick up food from an indoor location, such as The Daily Byte Cafe in the ECE Building, and deliver it to any room in the ECE Building. We want to create this project because it would make it very convenient for ECE faculty and students to get food within the ECE building, and they would not have to leave their belongings unattended, or disrupt their concentration or workflow, or stand in queue at the Daily Byte, only to find that their favorite item was sold out! We are also interested in this project because its functionality can also be expanded (beyond ECE 445) to deliver textbooks, documents, office supplies, and everything else desired, by scaling the size of the robot. Although there are food delivery robots present in the industry in companies such as DoorDash, most of them only function outdoors and not indoors. And although there are some hotels that make use of indoor robots to deliver guest supplies, most of them are either line following robots, or track following robots. So this project is unique because it is going to be an autonomous indoor robot, which no one in the industry really building or deploying at the moment. **3. Solution Overview** Our design will have 3 components, the robot body and power subsystem, the robot control unit (which will contain the PCB, the camera, the Jetson Nano GPU, and the wifi card), and a laptop, **(a) The robot body and power subsystem:** will have dimensions 1'x1' (base), and 0.5' in height, which will be mounted on 4 wheels (2 each side on 2 parallel sides). Each wheel will be turned by a 370 brushless motor, and all four wheels will be connected in parallel with a 12 V battery and a voltage regulator. **(b) The control unit:** the only sensor that we will be using is the Kinect Xbox camera, to perform April Tag recognition and visual SLAM. The data stream generated by the camera on the video will be processed using Jetson Nano, a small GPU enabled computer that will process the camera data stream, and will use the M2 wifi card to transmit the required data to the Laptop. The laptop will run our core programs (explained in part (c)), and send signals back over the wifi, which will be used to control the electronic components of the PCB, which will be used to navigate the robot. Since the components of the control unit require a much smaller voltage than the motor and wheels, we will use a 5V battery for this subsection, along with a voltage regulator. **(c)The laptop:** The laptop will contain the user interface, which will be written in C++/Python, and will be used to place an order from a Daily Byte Cafe Menu, and to provide the room number in the ECEB to deliver to. The laptop will use the data sent by the GPU over the wifi to control the robot, using the following software sub-components: **(i) Localization and Mapping:** this will be done with the help of April Tags, which we will be stuck on the walls at specific locations in the ECE Building and detected by the camera, and we will make use of the apriltags_ros libraries to perform bundle calibration and video stream tag detection. We will also make use of visual SLAM, which will make use of the "slam tool box" ROS library. **(ii) Obstacle Avoidance and Path Planning:** We will be using "global_planner" for global path planning, "teb_local_planner" for optimizing the robot's trajectory with respect to trajectory execution time, separation from obstacles and compliance with kinodynamic constraints at runtime", and locomotor "which will provide a mechanism to for controlling what happens when the global and local planners succeed and fail." **4. Criteria for Success:** The project will be considered successful if: (a) The robot navigates around the ECE Building, avoiding the obstacles in its path, and reaches the Daily Byte successfully (b) The robot navigates around the ECE Building, avoiding the obstacles in its path, and delivers the food correctly (c) The robot navigates around the ECE Building, avoiding the obstacles in its path, and returns to a designated "rest station" in the ECE building lobby. |
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