A backbone-floyd hybrid path planning method for mobile robot transportation in multi-floor life science laboratories

Abstract

Over the last years, growing numbers of mobile robots have been employed for transportation tasks in indoor laboratories. In this paper, a new hybrid path planning strategy with its related systems is presented for multi-floor mobile robot transportation in life science laboratories. The presented method meets the requirements of life science laboratories, which has the innovative contents as follows: a) a Stargazer module is used as a stable and low-cost localization sensor with artificial landmarks that is easily installed to fit any size of laboratories; b) the MFS (Multi-floor System) is the core component of the RBC, which is proposed to process all the multi-floor operating issues during the mobile robot indoor transportation. In this MFS the robot indoor navigation (localization, mapping, and path planning) is focused; c) an IEEE 802.11g network is adopted to provide the wireless communicating environment for all developed software components/systems. In the network, a TCP/IP based protocol is designed to assure the reliability among dynamic transferring commands. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for the mobile robot multi-floor transportation in laboratory environments.