Modelling Robot Navigation to Assist Differently Abled Persons

Abstract

Attending requirements of differently abled persons have been a research challenge in the modern world. This matter is crucial in many situations such as waiting areas in receptions, lobbies, airports and hospitals. A research has been conducted to design a line-following robot for attending differently abled people by assisting in tasks such as collecting their documents and issuing the tokens in such situations. The line-following robot has been designed to identify the differently abled persons sitting in designated locations which are assigned with unique identification numbers. When a differently abled person takes a seat, a pressure sensor attached to the seat transmits the seat number to the robot. The robot maintains a database of seat numbers and corresponding paths from the robot original location to the relevant seat. The path description from the original location of the robot to the seat is a bit string denoting 0 for going forward and 1 for turning left or right as per the detected line. A panel of IR sensors has been fixed in 'V' shape to detect bends on the line. Another IR sensor has also been fixed in the front panel to detect obstacles on the straight-line segments. While on the move the robot receives information of new arrivals of persons. The robot operates on the first-come-first-served basis and attends to the persons on the return trip to the original location. This robotic system has been implemented by KST-TX01 technical transmitter and KST-RX806 super heterodyne receiver running on 16F877a pic microcontroller. This robot has been tested in real life for its accurate navigation capability.