Sensing with Autonomous Mobile Robots

Tag: Automobile Fuse

Integrating sensors with autonomously navigating robots makes them useful for many applications: delivery of packages, components, and supplies; monitoring wireless networks, radiation, or HVAC; and responding to emergencies and hazards. MobileRobots' intelligent, autonomous mobile platforms perform these and many other tasks. A result of nearly eleven years of development, the company's next-generation mobile robots are now being deployed in the automobile, semiconductor, healthcare, and building-automation industries.

Our mobile robotic platforms are fully autonomous—they drive themselves from place to place, safely avoiding obstacles (including people and pets) encountered along the way. Their advanced path-planning and mobility systems do not use external guidance systems, artificial paths, or special targets to navigate the workspace, eliminating the expensive retrofitting and installation common in today's automated-vehicle applications. The same versatility also allows the robot to go to any place accessible in the workspace, rather than being restricted to prescribed paths or to set goals. Moreover, the robots adapt to their workspace—especially to dynamic spaces such as a hospital ward—modifying their drive path as needed to "get there from here" automatically and reliably, without the need for human intervention.

Sensors play critical roles in our intelligent robotics. Some are simple; some quite sophisticated. Many are essential, such as those used for localization and navigation—key features that enable autonomous mobility.

Onboard interfaces and enabling robotics software also provide the means for integrating and managing sensor payloads to provide an alternative to mesh networking and manual sensor data collection. These technologies are collected into the company's Advanced Robotics Control System (ARCS). In addition to building their own robot applications, MobileRobots licenses the technologies to OEMs for use in their own ARCSinside robots.