Integration of Hardware and Software Designs for Object Grasping and Transportation by a Mobile Robot With Navigation Guidance Via a Unique Bearing-Alignment Mechanism

In this paper, we consider the systematic design and implementation of grasping and transportation by a mobile robot with low implementation complexity. The study is mainly divided into three aspects: 1) design of a mechanical gripper and an arm mounted on the robot for grasping; 2) design of the hardware communication configuration (HCC) for transportation guidance that includes a destination beacon and a sensor system on the robot that working together with some designed event-triggered communication mechanisms, among which the unique bearing-alignment mechanism is designed to calibrate the heading direction of the robot, the HCC is low cost in the sense of low energy consumption; and 3) an effective and low-cost heuristic transportation algorithm that is tightly incorporated with the designed HCC in an event-triggered manner. The particular contribution is the tight integration of the heuristic transportation algorithm and the HCC, and the very simple nature of the transportation algorithm dues to this integration, which passes some computational functions to the HCC. Numerical simulations and experiments are presented, showing the effectiveness of the proposed system.