Vision based office assistant robot system for indoor office environment

Abstract

This paper presents an office assistant robot that can be used in an unstructured indoor office environment. Among many technologies available, we used free and open source software and inexpensive sensors and materials to build the low cost but accurate robot. Robotic Operating System (ROS) indigo was used as the ground operating system on Ubuntu 14.04. The mobile robot, iRobot Create 2 was used as the basic robot and a structure was built to carry a mini-laptop and PrimeSense 3D vision sensor. A workstation computer was used as the central location PC which was kept still and map of office environment is built on it. User is able to give commands to the system via voice and virtual keys by the developed Android application (App). These three units, mobile robot, central workstation and Android devices, communicates through a Wi-Fi connection. The proposed robot could deliver documents or parcels in between office members according to the user commands. We allowed the robot to navigate autonomously and randomly between users and monitored its accuracy by looking at the completion of the route to a target user. Results show that the office assistant delivery robot has above 92% of accuracy in delivery process for a valid user input.