Development of Reception Mobile Robot in Department Stores

Autonomous mobile robots (AMR) are widely used in many applications, not only in industrial-based applications but also the service sectors. Mobile service robots (MSR) are AMRs that are specifically designed to be a service robots that serve non-industrial tasks. They can be operated alongside with human and, currently, found in various places, e.g. department stores, households, hospitals, and etc. The intractability with human and safety concern have become a challenging issue of the service robots. In this research, the MSR is developed to operate as a reception robot in a department store. The robot is able to interact with the customers. It can provide basic services of the reception, such as giving information about the department store, answering the location-based questions about shops, and lead the way to specific locations, and etc. The robot does not only interact verbally but also physically.

Regarding the hardware and low-level control, the MSR is designed based on differential drive mobile robot with Rocker-bogie mechanism. Free navigation can be achieved with Lidar. The control architecture is based on Robot Operating System (ROS). As it needs to interact closely with human, the robot is designed to comply with the safety standard  of mobile service robot (ISO13482:2014). In regard to the high-level control, an intelligent agent (IA) with state machine is used to plan the tasks according to the environment and users’ activities and conditions. It is equipped with a chatbot in order to communicate with the customers. Eventually, the robot was tested in the actual environment which is a department store.