Assistive mobile robot for industrial and academic applications

With the rapid development of robotic technology, a number of robotic units have been deploying in the developed societies to assists humans in routine jobs. Specifically, domain of assistive robotics has been expanding and providing benefits to educational and commercial entities. In developing societies, no significant usage of robots has been present and clearly, they are far behind to grab advantages of technologies. This paper is presenting development and application of custom made assistive robotic unit for educational and commercial use. The complete mechanical and electronic hardware of the robot has been designed and manufactured locally by keeping local needs and financial constraint in mind. Main features of the robot are to assists humans by receiving user command electronically. In order to localize in crowded vicinity, 2D laser scanner and up view camera have been used to locate the robot using Kalman Filtering (KF) technique. An open source implementation of KF has been adopted using Robot Operating System (ROS) platform. In addition to this, it can transfer surveillance image to server, interact through gestures at 12 '' inch LCD screen which is acting like face of robot. It has been tested inside university in working time. Satisfactory results have been found by viewing ground truth. In addition, it has been tested as demonstrator in front of primary school students and found positive results by observing responses of students. Complete system has been prepared for deployment in educational and commercial institutes. This work is partially supported with HEC-NRPU-6061 research grant.