MobileCharger: an Autonomous Mobile Robot with Inverted Delta Actuator for Robust and Safe Robot Charging
This addresses the need for safe and robust charging systems to increase the prevalence of autonomous mobile robots, representing an incremental improvement with specific hardware integration.
The paper tackles the problem of autonomous charging between mobile robots by developing MobileCharger, a system using an Inverted Delta actuator with vision-tactile perception, achieving 84.2% precision in electrode detection and 83% success rate in trials.
MobileCharger is a novel mobile charging robot with an Inverted Delta actuator for safe and robust energy transfer between two mobile robots. The RGB-D camera-based computer vision system allows to detect the electrodes on the target mobile robot using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The embedded high-fidelity tactile sensors are applied to estimate the misalignment between the electrodes on the charger mechanism and the electrodes on the main robot using CNN based on pressure data on the contact surfaces. Thus, the developed vision-tactile perception system allows precise positioning of the end effector of the actuator and ensures a reliable connection between the electrodes of the two robots. The experimental results showed high average precision (84.2%) for electrode detection using CNN. The percentage of successful trials of the CNN-based electrode search algorithm reached 83% and the average execution time accounted for 60 s. MobileCharger could introduce a new level of charging systems and increase the prevalence of autonomous mobile robots.