Intelligent Navigation and Micro-Spectrometer Content Inspection System for a Homecare Mobile Robot

Homecare automation draws increasing attention due to the ageing situation. Robotic assistance allows the elderly and the disabled to live at home safely and comfortably rather than in a costly and unfamiliar healthcare facility. A hierarchical robotic assistance system is proposed that incorporates intelligent navigation and identification of the unknown medicines. ANN (Artificial Neural Network) classify the environment for selection of FLC (Fuzzy Logic Controller) based navigation strategy. The onboard micro-spectrometer senses the contents of chemical specimens. The novel histogram analysis on the transmittance and absorbance spectra is fused to recognize the nominal specimen. The proposed micro-spectrometer based content inspection system using mobile robot is also the 1st approach in the world that aimed to the home care application. The experiment demonstrates that the navigation system is robust under various uncertainties to enable the robot effectively and efficiently traverse through various environments. The on-board micro-spectrometer medicine identification system successfully classifies various nominal specimens.