Development of a Low-Cost Autonomous Robot for Industrial Monitoring

Abstract

Continuous monitoring of the industry setting is necessary to maintain efficiency of operations, safety, and predictive maintenance. The traditional industrial monitoring systems are highly dependent on localized sensors and human observation, which result in expensive installation, restricted coverage zone and could be unsafe to operators. The recent progress in the embedded systems, robotics, and low-cost sensors has made it possible to design the autonomous mobile robot able to conduct the industrial inspection tasks effectively. The present paper introduces the design, development, and testing of the low cost autonomous robot that could be used in the industrial monitoring technology. The suggested system incorporates inexpensive sensing sub-system, control architecture based on microcontrollers, wireless communication and autonomous navigation. Robot has the potential to check environmental conditions like temperature, humidity, gas content and vibration and also move freely within the industrial floors and relay real time statistics to a monitoring station. To be able to scale and be cost-effective, it adopts a modular hardware design and a layered software architecture. There are sensor fusion methods used in obstacle detection and navigation, and power-saving algorithms used in increasing battery life. Through experiment verification it is proved that above the developed robot has a sure monitoring performance with satisfactory accuracy at relatively low cost as compared to other standard industrial monitoring systems. The offered solution can be taken as an alternative to small- and medium-scale industries, which can enhance monitoring, safety, and reliability of operations by automating their tasks. It is rather economical and practical.