Intelligent Control for Illuminance Measurement by an Autonomous Mobile Robot

Over the last decade, the labor shortage suffers various industry sectors due to declining birthrate and aging population. Thus, autonomous robots have been widely researched for overcoming the labor-shortage phenomena. The construction sector is one of the industries that require high manpower to conduct various tasks. Traditional illuminance measurement in construction sites is one of the tasks that require much manpower and consumption time. As such, the development of various robots has been conducted to autonomously measure construction sites' illuminance. In this paper, we develop an autonomous mobile robot to perform illuminance measurement while performing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and obstacle avoidance. Human operators first set a navigation path and send it to the robot. With the given path, the robot starts to navigate the environment autonomously and measures the illuminance of the target points in the environment. The robot is validated through several experiments conducted in real-world indoor environments. Experimental results showed that the robot was able to autonomously measure the illuminance of the environment.