Design and Development of Human Following Autonomous Airport Baggage Transportation System

This paper aims to the design and development of a miniaturized model of a baggage carrying robot that can autonomously navigate from its parking place to the passenger at the airport and follow the passenger by avoiding the obstacles in its path. In airports, trolleys are used by the passengers to carry the baggage during check-in or exit. It becomes very difficult when the passenger has to carry a large amount of luggage as well as need to take care of their children or elderly people. Under these circumstances, the proposed autonomous robot, here named Smart Luggage Robot will be of great help. The robot is equipped with a GPS system that navigates the robot from its parking location to the passenger who has booked it using a mobile app. After loading the baggage, the user/passenger enable the app and the robot follows the passenger up to the check-in or exit point. The robot finally generates the bill based on the distance and weight of the baggage. This paper discusses the hardware and software components used to build the robot, and also presents an obstacle avoidance algorithm for the robot to follow the passenger. The built prototype has been successfully tested at the airport.