Towards design and development of autonomous mobile platforms for delivery and collection

The deployment of an automated mobile platform will help enhance the productivity of logistics tasks, such as collection and delivery. Providing an autonomous solution for such logistic tasks would enable staff to focus on other tasks. There are, currently, some commercially available solutions for these logistic tasks where an autonomous mobile platform is able to move from one location to another within a structured environment such as in a hospital, home, or office. In this paper, we present our approach to develop a cost effective mobile platform to be used for logistic tasks. The proposed approach is capable of navigating autonomously within a designated area. This approach creates a map of the area where then various stations will be located on the generated map. The proposed mobile platform navigates between the indicated stations without the need to follow special markers in the area. This reduces the additional cost of applying physical alterations to the area such as drawing lines on the floor or placing laser markers which are necessary requirements for many of the commercial solutions. In addition, the proposed solution is able to navigate while maintaining safety for both the people moving around and also to the items being transported.