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AnAutonomous Transportation Robot for Urban Environments
Konstantin Lassnig1 and Clemens Mu¨hlbacher2 and Gerald Steinbauer2 and Stefan Gspandl3 and Michael Reip3
Abstract—The transportation of goods is a central task of
today’s economy. The cheap transportation of goods allows
the wide spread of today’s internet based sales. To perform
such transportation tasks one currently relies on humans. This
imposes constraintswhen the transportation can be performed
and imposes constraints on the costs. To address this time
and cost constraints an automatic transportation of goods is
preferred.
Such an automatic transportation can be performed by an
autonomousrobot, as theonesused inwarehouseenvironments.
Although such environments are diverse andundergo a certain
amount of change they are still rather static environments.
To allow robots to perform the transportation in outdoor
environments severalproblemsneed tobe tackled.Oneneeds to
deal with large operation areas, uneven ground, and dynamic
objects. In this paper, we present a robot system which can
copewith these problems andallows to perform transportation
tasks in outdoor environments. The focus of this paper will be
on the localization andnavigation of the robotic in the outdoor
environment allowing the robot to performoutdoor deliveries.
I. INTRODUCTION
The cheap transportation of goods is a central part of
today’s economy. Reasonable prices of goods which are sold
over the internet, heavily depend on transportation costs.
Today’s supply chain requires a very dense distribution
network and relies on the fact that sending a lot of packages
on the same route is cheap. The larger number of goods
for one route the cheaper it becomes. This is in contrast
with the need for transporting goods to a single customer.
Such a transportation is characterized by a few goods for one
transportation route. To address this, robots offer a possible
solution. Using a robot, the transportation can be performed
in a flexible manner. Additionally, if multiple robots are used
one can simply balance the load of transportation tasks on
several robots.
The use of a robot fleet for transportation tasks is getting
adopted for warehouse environments nowadays [1], [2], [3].
These robot systems allow transporting goods in the ware-
housewithout theneedofan adaptionof the warehouse.This
is achieved by using algorithms allowing a localization and
navigation in an indoor environment [4]. These algorithms
use a 2D map of the environment. Such a map can be stored
easily in the robots memory for a warehouse but not for
1Konstantin Lassnig is with ARTI, Graz Austria. This author was with
the Institute for Software Technology when contributing, Graz University
of Technology, Graz, Austria.klassnig@arti-robots.com
2Clemens Mu¨hlbacher and Gerald Steinbauer are with the Institute
for Software Technology, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria.
{cmuehlba,steinbauer}@ist.tugraz.at
3Stephan Gspandl and Michael Reip are with incubedIT, Hart bei Graz,
Austria. {gspandl,reip}@incubedit.com large outdoor environments such as a city. Furthermore, the
2D map can be easily used in a warehouse for navigation as
onecanassumea reasonableflatground.Suchanassumption
cannot be made for an outdoor environment where the robot
needs to ensure that it is not falling over road curbs.
To allow a robot system to be used for transportation
tasks in a large scale outdoor environment, one needs to
address the problems which are imposed by the scale of the
environment as well as the uneven ground. In this paper,
we show a robot system which addresses these problems.
The size of the environment is addressed by splitting the
environment into smaller areas allowing the robot to keep
only a small map in its memory. To allow the robot to
be globally localized one additionally stores how the small
pieces are related to each other. To tackle the uneven ground
only the area close to the robot needs to be considered. This
space is represented as a 2.5D surface and interpreted to find
possible holes.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In
the next section, we will discuss the software system used
by the robot to perform transportation tasks in an outdoor
environment.Theproceedingsectiondiscusseshowthe robot
localizes itself despite the size of the environment. In Section
IV we discuss how the robot navigates in the environment.
This section also comprises a description how the robot deals
with the uneven ground. Afterward, we discuss some related
research. Finally, we conclude the paper and point out some
future work.
II. SYSTEM OVERVIEW
Fig. 1. The transport robot [5].
In this paper, we discuss a robot which can perform a
transportation task on a university campus autonomously.
The robot can navigate indoor as well as outdoor. Further-
more, the robot considers the uneven ground outdoors to
39
Proceedings of the OAGM&ARW Joint Workshop
Vision, Automation and Robotics
- Titel
- Proceedings of the OAGM&ARW Joint Workshop
- Untertitel
- Vision, Automation and Robotics
- Autoren
- Peter M. Roth
- Markus Vincze
- Wilfried Kubinger
- Andreas Müller
- Bernhard Blaschitz
- Svorad Stolc
- Verlag
- Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz
- Ort
- Wien
- Datum
- 2017
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-3-85125-524-9
- Abmessungen
- 21.0 x 29.7 cm
- Seiten
- 188
- Schlagwörter
- Tagungsband
- Kategorien
- International
- Tagungsbände