Mobile robot with preliminary-announcement function of forthcoming motion using light-ray

This paper discusses the design and the basic characteristic of the mobile robot PMR-1 with the preliminary-announcement and display function of the forthcoming operation (the direction of motion and the speed of motion) to the people around the robot by drawing a scheduled course on a running surface using light-ray. The laser pointer is used as a light source and the light from the laser pointer is reflected in a mirror. The light-ray is projected on a running surface and a scheduled course is drawn by rotating the reflector around the pan and the tilt axes. The preliminary-announcement and display unit of the developed mobile robot can indicate the operation until 3-second-later preliminarily, so the robot moves drawing the scheduled course from the present to 3-second-later. The experiment on coordination between the preliminary-announcement and the movement has been carried out, and we confirmed the correspondence of the announced course with the robot trajectory both in the case that the movement path is given beforehand and in the case that the robot is operated with manual input from a joystick in real-time. So we have validated the coordination algorithm between the preliminary-announcement and the real movement.