A Comprehensive Study of Mobile Robot: History, Developments, Applications, and Future Research Perspectives

An Adaptive and Automatic Power Supply Distribution System with Active Landmarks for Autonomous Mobile Robots

With the development of automation and intelligent technologies, the demand for autonomous mobile robots in the industry has surged to alleviate labor-intensive tasks and mitigate labor shortages. However, conventional industrial mobile robots' route-tracking algorithms typically rely on passive markers, leading to issues such as inflexibility in changing routes and high deployment costs. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel approach utilizing active landmarks-battery-powered luminous landmarks that enable robots to recognize and adapt to flexible navigation requirements. However, the reliance on batteries necessitates frequent recharging, prompting the development of an automatic power supply system. This system integrates omnidirectional contact electrodes on mobile robots, allowing to recharge active landmarks without precise positional alignment. Despite these advancements, challenges such as the large size of electrodes and non-adaptive battery charging across landmarks persist, affecting system efficiency. To mitigate these issues, this research focuses on miniaturizing active landmarks and optimizing power distribution among landmarks. The experimental results of this study demonstrated the effectiveness of our automatic power supply method and the high accuracy of landmark detection. Our power distribution calculation method can adaptively manage energy distribution, improving the system's persistence by nearly three times. This study aims to enhance the practicality and efficiency of mobile robot remote control systems utilizing active landmarks by simplifying installation processes and extending operational durations with adaptive and automatic power supply distribution.

An improved human activity recognition technique based on convolutional neural network

A convolutional neural network (CNN) is an important and widely utilized part of the artificial neural network (ANN) for computer vision, mostly used in the pattern recognition system. The most important applications of CNN are medical image analysis, image classification, object recognition from videos, recommender systems, financial time series analysis, natural language processing, and human-computer interfaces. However, after the technological advancement in the power of computing ability and the emergence of huge quantities of labeled data provided through enhanced algorithms, nowadays, CNN is widely used in almost every area of study. One of the main uses of wearable technology and CNN within medical surveillance is human activity recognition (HAR), which must require constant tracking of everyday activities. This paper provides a comprehensive study of the application of CNNs in the classification of HAR tasks. We describe their enhancement, from their antecedents up to the current state-of-the-art systems of deep learning (DL). We have provided a comprehensive working principle of CNN for HAR tasks, and a CNN-based model is presented to perform the classification of human activities. The proposed technique interprets data from sensor sequences of inputs by using a multi-layered CNN that gathers temporal and spatial data related to human activities. The publicly available WISDM dataset for HAR has been used to perform this study. This proposed study uses the two-dimensional CNN approach to make a model for the classification of different human activities. A recent version of Python software has been used to perform the study. The rate of accuracy for HAR through the proposed model in this experiment is 97.20%, which is better than the previously estimated state-of-the-art technique. The findings of the study imply that using DL methods for activity recognition might greatly increase accuracy and increase the range of applications where HAR can be used successfully. We have also described the future research trends in the field of HAR in this article.

Velocity range-based reward shaping technique for effective map-less navigation with LiDAR sensor and deep reinforcement learning

In recent years, sensor components similar to human sensory functions have been rapidly developed in the hardware field, enabling the acquisition of information at a level beyond that of humans, and in the software field, artificial intelligence technology has been utilized to enable cognitive abilities and decision-making such as prediction, analysis, and judgment. These changes are being utilized in various industries and fields. In particular, new hardware and software technologies are being rapidly applied to robotics products, showing a level of performance and completeness that was previously unimaginable. In this paper, we researched the topic of establishing an optimal path plan for autonomous driving using LiDAR sensors and deep reinforcement learning in a workplace without map and grid coordinates for mobile robots, which are widely used in logistics and manufacturing sites. For this purpose, we reviewed the hardware configuration of mobile robots capable of autonomous driving, checked the characteristics of the main core sensors, and investigated the core technologies of autonomous driving. In addition, we reviewed the appropriate deep reinforcement learning algorithm to realize the autonomous driving of mobile robots, defined a deep neural network for autonomous driving data conversion, and defined a reward function for path planning. The contents investigated in this paper were built into a simulation environment to verify the autonomous path planning through experiment, and an additional reward technique "Velocity Range-based Evaluation Method" was proposed for further improvement of performance indicators required in the real field, and the effectiveness was verified. The simulation environment and detailed results of experiments are described in this paper, and it is expected as guidance and reference research for applying these technologies in the field.