Indoor autonomous patrol robot

Featured in iDP Project Showcase 2020

Project Motivation

At the warehouse of our interviewees from Shell, the warehouse safety inspections are performed by the Health, Safety, Security and Environment (HSSE) Officer. The HSSE Officer is responsible for checking oil leakages, alignment and placement issues, fire standard, ensuring obstacle-free walk and drive lanes, monitoring the safety aspect of the division, as well as sending reports on their assessment frequently. The role is riddled with routine, repetitive and sometimes high-risk tasks. This project aims to design an autonomous patrol system that could help HSSE officers to perform some of those more potentially risky, mundane but repetitive, as well as those less important jobs with higher quality.

Design Solution

An Indoor Autonomous Patrol Robot is an intelligent platform that learns its surrounding environment and performs routine safety checks using an array of different sensors. We have designed an intelligent autonomous patrol robot system. The team has selected a commercially available remote control toddler’s car as the platform of the system. The system could be wirelessly controlled hundreds of meters apart as long as the host computer and the robot are in the same Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). The system navigates with the help of a camera and ultrasonic sensors. The robot could automatically explore and map the indoor environment, then it will traverse every pathway in the indoor environment (warehouse) at least once to perform its safety check-ups. During its trip, it will constantly check for walkway obstacles, assess rack stability, monitor illumination conditions, as well as to detect the fire using computer vision algorithms. The system will repeat this process according to a preset time interval.