Development of an autonomous lawn mower with minimalist hardware approach

Download
index.pdf
2014
Çiçek, Serkan
Show full item record
127
views
121
downloads
Starting from early 2000’s domestic robots have been taking their place in our daily lives. Today, numerous products are globally available on the domestic robotics market. Among many domestic robot types, robotic cleaners and lawn mowers take the lead in this competition, with their success for reducing undesired house chores. Like in every other product, the price-performance ratio is the most significant evaluation metric for a consumer while buying an autonomous robotic cleaner or an autonomous lawn mower (ALM). The "performance" in this context, mainly denotes the navigation success of the robot. Therefore, it is becoming more and more crucial for developers to offer best navigation performance with the lowest price in the market. In this thesis, ALMs are chosen as the field of study. A minimalist, low-cost navigation approach has been proposed in order to conform customer and market requirements. For this scope, a differentially driven ALM, operating with predefined geometrical coverage patterns has been designed, developed, improved and manufactured. All of these phases are given in detail in this study. The use of the localization methods that demand expensive hardware is avoided. In order to present a low-cost product, dead-reckoning method is used with only wheel encoders. In addition, an enhanced position correction technique especially for ALMs is developed. In this technique, odometric error compensation is applied, based on the identification of mowed and non-mowed lawn areas. The main objective of this technique is to provide an improvement for the coverage performance of the ALM. After completion of the design, manufacturing and system integration tasks, performance tests have also been performed. These physical indoor and outdoor tests have been performed on different terrains with various coverage patterns. These tests revealed both the navigation characteristics of the ALM and the coverage performance improvement of the proposed position correction technique. Test results showed that the proposed position correction technique achieved a significant improvement over sole odometry for outdoor coverage. It is concluded that the proposed technique can be an alternative compared to relatively expensive outdoor navigation methods.
Lawn mowers., Power lawn mowers., Autonomous robots., Trajectories (Mechanics).
http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12617049/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/23425
Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

Design of an image acquisition setup for mimic tracking
Aköner, Özgüler Mine; Koku, Ahmet Buğra; Department of Mechanical Engineering (2007)
With the advances in computer technology and the changing needs of people’s daily lives, robots start to offer alternative solutions. As one of these solutions, the branch of humanoid robots emerged as advanced robots that can interact with people. Robot faces are one of the most effective means of interacting with people; since they can express their emotions and reactions through facial mimics. However, the development of realistic robot faces necessitates the knowledge of the trajectories and displacemen...
Feedback Motion Planning For a Dynamic Car Model via Random Sequential Composition
Özcan, Melih; Ankaralı, Mustafa Mert (2019-01-01)
Autonomous cars and car-like robots have gained huge popularity recently due to the recent advancements in technology and AI industry. Motion and path planning is one of the most fundamental problems for such systems. In the literature, kinematic models are widely adopted for planning and control for these type of robots due to their simplicity (control and analysis) and fewer computational requirements. Though, applicability of kinematic models are limited to very low speeds or some specific cases, which c...
A novel vision-based calibration framework for industrial robotic manipulators
Balanji, Hamid Majidi; Turgut, Ali Emre; Tunc, Lutfi Taner (2022-02-01)
With the increasing involvement of industrial robots in manufacturing processes, the demand for high quality robots has increased considerably. A high-quality robot is a robot having good repeatability and accuracy. Industrial robots are known to have very good repeatability, however it is not the same with accuracy. Due to harsh working conditions, accuracy of robots deteriorate over time. Calibration is a practical approach to sustain accuracy. In calibration, position and orientation of the tool center p...
Towards socially acceptable robots
Koku, Ahmet Buğra; ALFORD, ANTHONY (2000-10-11)
The robots are getting more and more into our lives. However, to become an integral part of daily life, they should be socially accepted by the humans. Evidently, the acceptance rate will increase as human-robot interaction gets closer to human-human interaction. in this study, a web-based information filtering system, which enables a humanoid robot to initiate interaction with a human by generating human-like daily conversations, is developed.
Localization for mobile robots using skyline in panoramic images
Koku, Ahmet Buğra (Journal of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of Gazi University, 2019-01-01)
Advances in robotics liberated robots from factory floors by the end of 20th century. Use of robots in our daily lives is only expected to increase in time. Robots, while relieving us of the burden of tedious, hard and dangerous tasks, most of them are still expected to be territorial, i.e. they will operate in a predefined or rather bounded environment. For enhanced performance, a robot should be familiar with its territory. In this work, use of skylines extracted from panoramic images is studied in order ...
Citation Formats
S. Çiçek, “Development of an autonomous lawn mower with minimalist hardware approach,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2014.
METU IIS - Integrated Information Service open@metu.edu.tr