Towards an Optimal Footprint Based Area Coverage Strategy for a False-Ceiling Inspection Robot

Abstract

False-ceiling inspection is a critical factor in pest-control management within a built infrastructure. Conventionally, the false-ceiling inspection is done manually, which is time-consuming and unsafe. A lightweight robot is considered a good solution for automated false-ceiling inspection. However, due to the constraints imposed by less load carrying capacity and brittleness of false ceilings, the inspection robots cannot rely upon heavy batteries, sensors, and computation payloads for enhancing task performance. Hence, the strategy for inspection has to ensure efficiency and best performance. This work presents an optimal functional footprint approach for the robot to maximize the efficiency of an inspection task. With a conventional footprint approach in path planning, complete coverage inspection may become inefficient. In this work, the camera installation parameters are considered as the footprint defining parameters for the false ceiling inspection. An evolutionary algorithm-based multi-objective optimization framework is utilized to derive the optimal robot footprint by minimizing the area missed and path-length taken for the inspection task. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is analyzed using numerical simulations. The results are validated on an in-house developed false-ceiling inspection robot—Raptor—by experiment trials on a false-ceiling test-bed.

Bioinspired Perception and Navigation of Service Robots in Indoor Environments: A Review

“…Moreover, Table 4 lists the multimodal navigation. The applications of the multimodal navigation consist of entertainment [ 143 ], security [ 133 ], transport [ 2 , 106 , 107 , 110 , 112 , 147 ], assistance [ 2 , 16 , 108 ], exploration [ 3 , 134 , 135 , 138 , 141 ], social applications [ 12 , 140 ], tracking [ 105 , 125 , 131 , 145 , 146 ], caring and monitoring [ 113 ], disaster monitoring or search and rescue [ 136 , 149 ], floor cleaning [ 137 ], wheeled robot [ 109 ], person following [ 129 ], and false-ceiling inspection [ 157 ]. The combination of virtual sensors and neural networks is most commonly used in multimodal navigation, which represents 77.19% of the cited research.…”

“…The limitation of the work was that it only applied to the sagittal plane, although the antidisturbance ability and irregular terrains are important for the robot. Pathmakumar et al [ 157 ] designed an optimal footprint-based coverage system for false-ceiling inspection with a multiobjective optimization algorithm. The system included a localization module with UWB, a controller module with Wi-Fi, locomotion modules with encoders and motors, and a perception module with the camera.…”

A Novel Path Planning Strategy for a Cleaning Audit Robot Using Geometrical Features and Swarm Algorithms

“…Furthermore, a sector-based online complete coverage planning to bridge the shortcomings of cleaning robots with limited sensing and computation resource is proposed by Lee et al [ 8 ]. The problem of ensuring cleaning efficiency is addressed from a different perspective by introducing optimal footprint for robots alongside the conventional complete coverage path planning approaches [ 9 ]. The work mentioned above is validated on a vertical surface cleaning robot by performing an effective hydro-blasting for ship-hull cleaning.…”

Toward a Comprehensive Domestic Dirt Dataset Curation for Cleaning Auditing Applications

“…The research work mentioned in [ 9 ] presents an efficient charging mechanism for cleaning robots using infrared spots and neural network-based location estimators. A novel functional footprint-based efficient ship hull cleaning method using evolutionary algorithms is reported in [ 10 ]. The preceding analysis shows that a significant amount of research has focused on adapting the latest technologies for enhancing the performance of cleaning.…”