BeetleBot

Overview

BeetleBot is a mobile robot that has been developed to operate in realistic environments. Different from previous state-of-the-art mobile robots, BeetleBot is designed based on the most recent advancements of actuator, mechanical design, and artificial intelligence. These advantages allow the robot to have powerful features including ultramobility, accurate localization, intensive AI ecosystem, and autonomous navigation in normal as well as complex and rough terrain environments. Based on its novel design, BeetleBot can be used in a variety of tasks including but not limited to autonomous delivery, exploration and surveillance, or humanoid-robot interaction. Besides the development of the robot, we also build large-scale open-source simulation models that are fully integrated with ROS and can be used for rapid testing and deployment of any robots.

Introduction

Mobile robotics is a long-lasting research and development field in both academia and industry [1]. In general, a mobile robot is designed to autonomously move through its environment without the need of a human operator or on a fixed predetermined path. The mobile robots are usually equipped with an array of sophisticated sensors that enable them to understand, interpret, and act inside the environment, which help them to perform its tasks in the most efficient manner and possible path such as navigating around fixed or moving obstacles (e.g., building, people, and debris).

Based on the natural advantages of its design, mobile robots are widely used to work independently or collaboratively with humans in various real-world applications such as logistics (e.g., autonomous delivery), inspection and maintenance (e.g., inspection robot), security and defense (e.g., surveillance robot), agriculture (e.g., fruit picking robot), or urban transportation. Especially, with the recent Coronavirus pandemic, the need of a human-friendly mobile platform that can assist patients in the hospital or be used in healthcare services in general is increasing significantly.

Although there are currently many mobile platforms available, they all share two main limitations: i) Most of the mobile robots are designed for a particular problem, hence it is not a trivial task to adapt and use the robot in a new task. ii) The integration between hardware, software, and AI for mobile platforms is still a challenge during the deployment. Motivated by these limitations, this paper aims to develop a new mobile platform for remote or autonomous operation in real-world scenarios. Our new robot - BeetleBot - has flexible maneuverability and strong performance to traverse through doorways, over obstacles or rough terrains that may be encountered in indoor, outdoor, or rough terrain environments. Coming with state-of-the-art sensor system and novel AI-driven software, BeetleBot can perform a variety of useful tasks autonomously.

Publications

Anh Nguyen, Erman Tjiputra, Quang D. Tran. "BeetleBot: A Multi-Purpose AI-Driven Mobile Robot for Realistic Environments". UKRAS 2020 Conference: “Robots into the real world” Proceedings, 2020.

References

[1] R. Siegwart, I. R. Nourbakhsh, and D. Scaramuzza, Introduction to autonomous mobile robots. MIT press, 2011.