Development of a Cost-Efficient 6-DoF Service Robot

Abstract

The high rate of robotics and artificial intelligence development is the main factor that  contributes to the elevated usage of service robots in the fields of health care, hospitality, logistics, domestic support, and other places. Nonetheless, high purchasing, and maintaining cost is still a big impediment to its widespread deployment particularly in the economies of the developing countries and small-scale institutions. Im this paper, the design, development and evaluation of a six degrees-of-freedom (6-DoF) and yet economical service robot are introduced with a combination of low cost hardware, modular mechanical design and smart software to provide a high operational performance at a lower cost. A 6-DoF robot allows complete spatial movement as well as orientation, and as a result, it can be accurately manipulated and navigated and interacts with any dynamic environment. A majority of commercial 6-DoF service robots are based on very costly industrial quality actuators, proprietary controllers, and closed-source software software ecosystems, which cost high upfront and lifecycle. To surmount these shortcomings, this study proposes a robot platform that relies on open-source hardware, commodity sensors, low-cost micro controllers and optimized control algorithms which will allow a scalable and inexpensive deployment. The six, independently actuated joints in this proposed robot employ the servo-based and the stepper-based actuation that offers three rotational and three translational degrees of freedom. A lightweight robotic manipulator allows a human-robot interaction and pick-and-place functions, and a differential-drive mobile base allows the use of a planar navigation. The perception system uses ultrasonic, RGB-D, and inertial measurement units (IMUs) in order to map the environment, localization, and avoid obstacles. The operating system, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is adopted as the control system along with motor control boards, which are equipped with the microcontrollers that allow real-time motion planning and feedback control. The full mathematical representation of the robot kinematics and dynamics are constructed based on DenavitHartenberg (D-H) parameters so that appropriate control over motion and path planning can be done. The methods of optimization are used to ensure that the actuators use the minimum energy with a reasonable speed and mass carrying. The system can be checked by the experimental testing in environment service conditions such as object delivery, autonomous navigation, and human-robot interaction. These findings indicate that the suggested system can operate at approximately 80 percent of the functionality of 6-DoF service robots with just under 35 percent of the cost whilst operating with reasonable accuracy, reliability and safety. Modular design enables simple upgrades and adaption to new service environments, and is appropriate to hospitals, educational institutions and smart buildings. The study offers a wide scope of projecting low-cost service robots and it helps in the democratization of robotics since it facilitates cheap and scalable robotic solutions to service tasks on the ground.