ABSTRACT
In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, telepresence robots (TRs) are increasingly a part of healthcare, academia, and industry due to their enormous benefits. IoT provides a sensor-based environment in which robots receive more precise information about their surroundings. The researchers work day and night to reduce cost, duration, and complexity in all application areas. It provides tremendous benefits, such as sustainability, welfare improvement, cost-effectiveness, user-friendliness, and adaptability. However, it faces many challenges in making critical decisions during motion, which requires a long training period and intelligent motion planning. These include obstacle avoidance during movement, intelligent control in hazardous situations, and ensuring the right measurements. Following up on these issues requires a sophisticated control design and a secure communication link. This paper proposes a control design to normalize the integration process and offer an auto-MERLIN robot with cognitive and sustainable architecture. A control design is proposed through system identification and modeling of the robot. The robot control design was evaluated, and a prototype was prepared for testing in a hazardous environment. The robot was tested by considering various parameters: driving straight ahead, turning right, self-localizing, and receiving commands from a remote location. The maneuverability, controllability, and stability results show that the proposed design is well-developed and cost-efficient, with a fast response time. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly minimizes the obstacle collisions. The results confirm the employability and sustainability of the proposed design and demonstrate auto-MERLIN's capabilities as a sustainable robot ready to be deployed in highly interactive scenarios.
ABSTRACT
Featured ApplicationTelepresence robot is useful for remote applications, healthcare and remote sensing.Background: The development of telepresence robots is getting much attention in various areas of human–robot interaction, healthcare systems and military applications because of multiple advantages such as safety improvement, lower energy and fuel consumption, exploitation of road networks, reduced traffic congestion and greater mobility. Methods: In the critical decision-making process during the motion of a robot, intelligent motion planning takes an important and challenging role. It includes obstacle avoidance, searching for the safest path to follow, generating appropriate behavior and comfortable trajectory generation by optimization while keeping road boundaries and traffic rules as important concerns. Results: This paper presents a state machine algorithm for avoiding obstacles and speed control design to a cognitive architecture named auto-MERLIN. This research empirically tested the proposed solutions by providing implementation details and diagrams for establishing the path planning and obstacle tests. Conclusions: The results validate the usability of our approach and show auto-MERLIN as a ready robot for short- and long-term tasks, showing better results than using a default system, particularly when deployed in highly interactive scenarios. The stable speed control of the auto-MERLIN in case of detecting any obstacle was shown.
ABSTRACT
Telepresence robots have become popular during the COVID-19 era due to the quarantine measures and the requirement to interact less with other humans. Telepresence robots are helpful in different scenarios, such as healthcare, academia, or the exploration of certain unreachable territories. IoT provides a sensor-based environment wherein robots acquire more precise information about their surroundings. Remote telepresence robots are enabled with more efficient data from IoT sensors, which helps them to compute the data effectively. While navigating in a distant IoT-enabled healthcare environment, there is a possibility of delayed control signals from a teleoperator. We propose a human cooperative telecontrol robotics system in an IoT-sensed healthcare environment. The deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) offered improved control of the telepresence robot to provide assistance to the teleoperator during the delayed communication control signals. The proposed approach can stabilize the system in aid of the teleoperator by taking the delayed signal term out of the main controlling framework, along with the sensed IOT infrastructure. In a dynamic IoT-enabled healthcare context, our suggested approach to operating the telepresence robot can effectively manage the 30 s delayed signal. Simulations and physical experiments in a real-time healthcare environment with human teleoperators demonstrate the implementation of the proposed method.