An automated elevator management and multi-floor estimation for indoor mobile robot transportation based on a pressure sensor

摘要

In this paper, a new system is presented to manage the elevator operations. A Wi-Fi socket is established to connect with the ADAM module for calling the elevator and requesting the destination floor. This technique does not provide any feedback on the elevator's door status or its current floor which in some situations can make the robot losing its way to the destination. Computer vision can be utilized to identify the current floor. In some special situation (human obstacle between the robot camera and the floor number indicator, difficult light conditions etc.) the robot fails to detect its current floor number. Height measurements can be used in addition. The LPS25HB pressure sensor and the STM32L053 microcontroller as a height measurements system hardware platform are configured and programmed to sense the environment and detect the current floor number. An ultrasonic sensor is used to recognize the elevator door status. Two methods are applied to handle the pressure variations: a) Smoothing filter is used to handle the small variation in pressure sensor output. A practical analysis is performed to choose the filter parameter for balancing between the required time and the pressure reading stability. b) An adaptive calibration method is used to calibrate the sensor readings for the robot's current floor before entering the elevator to overcome the wide range of variation in daily pressure. The earlier developed localization method for multi-floor environment is utilized to identify the robot's current floor number outside the elevator. The developed method has been integrated into a real laboratory mobile robot transportation system. Numerous experiments have been implemented on different floors of a typical life sciences building to find the average and tolerance of the pressure in different floors, obtaining the daily variation of the pressure sensor, and finally validating the proposed elevator operation management system based H20 mobile robot. The validation experiments prove an efficient performance of the presented system.