The Design and Implementation of A Delivery System

Nowadays, robots have been applied to a variety of applications and industries. The rapid growth promotes the development of various robots for our life. For example, the huge labor work may be replaced with a robot in the catering industry. During the process, we observe if some routine jobs can be performed by a robot instead of people, then the performance can be improved and the cost can be saved. Especially, the meal delivery is a typical example that can be replaced by a robot. As a result, we address this issue by designing and implementing a meal delivery system. In contrast to existing meal delivery systems, our system allows consumers to take their own meals without waiters. In order to make our system user friendly, AGV (Automatic Guided Vehicle) and a robotic arm assembled by us are integrated to develop this system.In order to achieve the goal mentioned above, we aim at proposing a novel approach for the proposed system for the following stages. First, we try to construct a map of an environment for a robot because most food environments are indoors. Furthermore, we construct scenes for surrounding objects with laser sensors. Second, this map is applied to indoor navigation along the shortest path computed by the global planning. Third, the regional planning is applied to plan paths to avoid obstacles. Finally, we present a method to let a robot put a meal on the table by detecting its height first. In order to perform this action, we use an icon of the edge of a table.The proposed work can really provide a service while delivering a meal in a restaurant. Customers in a restaurant are unnecessary to taking a meal by themselves to replace waiters. As a result,, the sharing of labor saving time is achieved. The experiment shows that our work is really suitable for catering applications.