Food Delivery Automation in Restaurants Using Collaborative Robotics

Collaborative operation, even though challenging, has the ability to solve many difficult issues in automation of a system; reducing effort, time, error, etc. and increasing quality, capacity and efficiency. In this article the challenges and issues in collaborative operation of robots and their solution is discussed considering an application of restaurant automation with a team of mobile robots, acting as waiters, and a centralized control station. Centralized control station implements and run algorithms for target fixing, matching customer party size and table size and robot selection based on heuristics like energy, distance, etc. The mobile robot, acts as a line follower, has a modified A* algorithm for indoor navigation in the fixed size grid environment. The algorithms at central station will be implemented in MATLAB and the mobile robot operation will be achieved through FIREBIRD V experimenter kits housing android phones having application for food ordering.