Flexible Control and Task Manager System for Non-Contact Delivery Robots in COVID-19 Isolated Facilities

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global public health crisis, leading to increased costs for operating essential quarantine facilities and risks of infection for medical staff. To address these issues, we have developed a non-contact delivery robot, UTD-pro, that can deliver food and supplies to patients in an isolated residential treatment center. In case of emergency situations such as communication failure with the control system or malfunction of specific modules, the noncontact delivery robot should be able to perform commands robustly or return home. Otherwise, as before, medical staffs may have to enter the high-risk environment again. In this paper, we propose a flexible and robust remote control system and a robot task management system that enables the robot to execute commands correctly. Our robot task manager allows for autonomous task execution with a single command from the remote control system. Each robot task operates independently, allowing users to change task plans flexibly during robot operation. The sensor data communication and task execution communication processes are also independent, preventing any issue in one process from affecting the other. By applying our system to the robot, we conducted a long-term delivery experiment for a total of 7.723km for 79 days, and achieved 125 successes out of 149 trials. This experiment proves that our system can lead to stable delivery processes and contribute to the high reliability of the control system and the robot task manager.