Evaluating the Robot Inclusivity of Buildings Based on Surface Unevenness

Abstract

Mobile service robots experience excessive vibrations when travelling over uneven surfaces in their workspace, increasing the degradation rate of the mechanical components or disrupting the robot’s sensing abilities for proper localization and navigational capabilities. Robot inclusivity principles can determine the suitability of a site for robot performance by considering the ground’s unevenness. This paper proposes a novel framework to autonomously evaluate the Robot Inclusivity Level of buildings based on surface unevenness (RIL-SU) by quantifying the surface unevenness of floor surfaces. The surface unevenness values are converted to RIL-SU using a rule-based approach, and the corresponding RIL-SU is tagged to the map location. A coloured heatmap based on the RIL-SU values is created as a visual representation of the RIL-SU of a given space. This heatmap would be useful for modifying the environment to make it more robot-friendly or restrict the robot’s operation in certain areas to avoid possible robot failures. The experimental results show that the proposed framework can successfully generate a valid RIL-SU heatmap for building environments.