SLAM and obstacle detection for tall autonomous robotic medical assistant

Abstract

In the paper a solution proposal for indoor navigation and obstacle detection problem in hospital environment for a humanoid that is 150 cm tall was presented. As a medical assistant, the robot is expected to autonomously move between hospital rooms with extra care about people safety. The overview of existing solutions was made, mostly focused on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) applications including human-aware algorithms. Considering the robot size, a common approach for mobile robots utilizing single 2D laser scanner or RGB+Depth camera is not applicable as vertical field of view of scans is too narrow to detect all obstacles. We proposed a hybrid system combining laser scanner, multiple cameras and distance sensors. The hardware architecture and software design in Robot Operating System (ROS) were presented. The last part of the paper includes the future plans and proposals of improvements for the robot.