A fast method for mobile robot transportation in life science automation

Abstract

In modern life science laboratories, more and more complicated transportation tasks are needed among distributed automatic workbenches or laboratories. There are some special requirements for the kinds of transportation: high-accuracy; robust performance; economic cost and fast integration. In this paper a fast method is proposed to manage mobile robots for effective transportation in life science environments. The architecture of this method includes three components: the PMS for transportation request the Robot Remote Center (RRC) for transportation managing, and the Robot Board Center (RBC) for transportation executing. To include any kind and size of life science laboratories, this method adopts a standard TCP/IP network for data transmission, uses a series of extensible ceiling landmarks for robot indoor localization, utilizes a flexible map-based intelligent hybrid calculation for robot path planning, and enables collision avoidance by using a group of ultrasonic sensors and artificial potential field algorithm. An experiment in a real life science laboratory (celisca, Germany) shows that the proposed method meets all requirements of life science automation and has satisfactory performance.