ARC: Autonomous Robotic Carrier

Abstract

In today’s fast moving world people are often busy with their lives and they do not have time to go shopping in the malls or waiting in queues for their meal. Instead they want these things to be delivered to them. Autonomous delivery robots have been quite helpful with that as they do not require human interaction and can work efficiently and effectively with just coordinates of the map. Obtaining complete knowledge of a structure or a terrain can be extremely useful while understanding a map and navigating through it. A map is of extreme importance when it comes to autonomous package delivery. Map navigation techniques have been used for this matter, techniques which include Kinect, GPS, 3D Lidar and IMU. These techniques however are restricted to some aspects regarding their work, such that the Kinect can only work indoors due its brightness issue, the GPS can only work outdoors as it is unable to catch signals indoor and 3D Lidar might be a good option but is very expensive to be used commercially. A better and economical solution would be a low cost 2D Lidar that gives us a 360 degree coverage and gives us the angles and the direction of the objects in the environment. It can work indoors and outdoors or for that matter on any terrain and gives us an edge on all the previous techniques. The distance and the angle given by the 2D Lidar will be used to map the environment and simultaneously localize itself within the given environment. Autonomous delivery would be made much easier using a 2D Lidar because your package and our destination would just be a coordinate away, can be delivered with a single click. This technique decreases the human interaction thus gradually increases the efficiency.