Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : June 28, 2023 - July 01, 2023
Recently, autonomous mobile robots have been used in various fields. These robots need to be recharged periodically at charging stations. This charging method has disadvantages such as limiting the robots’ range of motion, increasing costs, and requiring installation spaces. Therefore, we propose a new charging method “Plugin-docking system”. Conventional Plugin-docking system has low docking accuracy to the wall outlet and takes time to finish docking. Thus, this study proposes a new robot control method to improve the docking accuracy and reduce the docking time. In addition to measuring with the camera, the new method uses encoder measurements and point cloud matching. Also, the control method of the robot was changed so that the outlet can be detected by the camera even at close range. As a result, it became possible to perform Plugin-docking with high accuracy for the wall outlet.
