Mobile robot of logistic assistance for a more effective, more reactive, and more safe mobility of groups - innovation step – Baudet-Rob2

The "robotic mule" for automatic transport of loads is an issue with a strong market potential both in the military domain and in civil sector as agriculture, construction, and merchandise warehouses ... The first ASTRID Baudet Rob project showed the feasibility of such a system by developing several people following systems with a mobile robot in using various sensorimotor modalities.
Two strategies of people following have been considered in the previous project. Either localize the person in the world using a global positioning system (GPS) to follow accurately the path taken by the person (or a group of persons). Or locate the person in the robot reference frame using tracking techniques based on sensory information from various sensors such as a laser rangefinder, a camera or a radio frequency triangulation. Finally an obstacle avoidance system was used in order to allow the robot to navigate safely into the environment while continuing to follow the person.
If the performances of such person following systems are satisfactory for some applications of the civil sector, the capabilities offered by such transportation robots are still limited for military purposes. The autonomy of the robot has been under-explored in the initial project in using only people following. Other applications such as conveying, long-range person following, automatic homing, waypoint navigation... are possible and desirable. These various systems will be explored in this Baudet-Rob2 Maturation project.
The main objectives of this maturation step are to fuse the previous developments designed for person tracking/following in order to provide the robot a set of robust sensory-motor behaviors and also to implement new features to perform most of the different “mule tasks”. We therefore first improve the robustness of the people tracking by merging or by selecting intelligently (depending on the context) different approaches proposed in the first ASTRID Baudet-Rob. It is then proposed to improve the agility of the robot by giving it greater crossing capabilities. To do that we propose to estimate the geometry of the ground the robot is navigating on and characterize its influence on its dynamic behavior. Secondly, the aim is to increase the autonomous capabilities of the robot by providing it additional features like automatic homing, waypoint navigation or conveying. Other crossing concepts will be added as automatic cruise control ensuring the physical integrity of the robot along the route or even the ability to stay in a security corridor while following the desired trajectory. The choice of these new features is based on the feasibility results obtained by the consortium members in other projects.
Developed prototypes will be improved iteratively throughout the project and results will be showed regularly during meetings with both industrial and military observers. This iterative process will lead to the continuous refining of the specifications and the increasing of their performances and functionalities.