When your smartphone becomes a low-cost household robot
A prototype smartphone app, VRa, allows a user to program robots to perform dull tasksUsing AR, the app allows the user to walk out where the robot should go to perform its tasks
Imagine this scenario. A factory worker in a small business unit wants something delivered from one area to another, but cannot afford to hire a developer to write a software programme for it, or hire a mobile robot to do the task.
Keeping such situations in mind, a team of Purdue University (US) researchers have developed a prototype smartphone app that allows a user to easily programme a robot to help factory workers perform mundane tasks, such as transporting goods or even help individuals take care of simple household chores like watering plants.
With this app, insists Karthik Ramani, Purdue’s Donald W. Feddersen professor of mechanical engineering, factory workers in smaller companies “can do the programming themselves, dramatically bringing down the costs of building and programming mobile robots".
Using augmented reality (AR), the app allows the user to either walk out where the robot should go to perform its tasks, or draw a workflow directly into real space. The app even offers options for how those tasks can be performed. After programming, the user drops the phone into a dock attached to the robot. While the phone needs to be familiar with the type of robot it’s “becoming", the dock can be wirelessly connected to the robot’s basic controls and motor.
Ramani’s lab has been testing the prototype app in real factory settings to evaluate user-driven applications. The researchers will present their report on the embedded app, called VRa, on 23 June at Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2019 in San Diego. The platform is patented through the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization, with plans to make it available for commercial use.
The phone is both the eyes and the brain of the robot, controlling its navigation and tasks. “As long as the phone is in the docking station, it is the robot," Ramani explains, adding: “Whatever you move about and do is what the robot will do."
To get the robot to execute a task that involves wirelessly interacting with another object or machine, the user simply scans the QR code of that object or machine while programming, effectively creating a network of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). Once docked, the phone (as the robot) uses information from the QR code to work with the objects. The researchers demonstrated this with robots watering a plant, vacuuming and transporting objects.
The user can also monitor the robot remotely through the app and make it start or stop a task, such as to go charge its battery or begin a 3D-printing job. The app provides an option to automatically record a video when the phone is docked, so that the user can play it back and evaluate a workflow.
Ramani’s lab made it possible for the app to know how to navigate and interact with its environment according to what the user specifies through building upon so-called “simultaneous localization and mapping"—types of algorithms that are also used in self-driving cars and drones.
To be sure, there are numerous do-it-yourself (DIY) kits on the internet that give instructions on how to build a low-cost smartphone-controlled robot. For instance, Keller Rinaudo, co-founder and CEO of Romotive, showcased a smartphone robot called Romo at TED 2103. Romo, then priced at about $150, was docked in a robotic base. When you downloaded the Romo app, the bot came to life, could smile at you and jumped back if you made a sudden movement. However, Rinaudo shelved Romo a couple of years later only to launch Zipline, a Rwanda-based medical product delivery company.
Closer home, students at Maharshtra-based Dattajirao Kadam Education (DTKE) Society’s Textile and Engineering Institute--the first nodal centre of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) for the western region--used the Galileo Gen 2.0 and Raspberry PI platforms and built a mobile phone-based fire-fighting robot and a staircase-climbing spider robot. Additionally, they developed a staircase-climbing spider robot, an automatic lawn grass-mower robot; an accelerometer-based robotic arm and a motorbike navigation and control contraption using IoT.
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