Robotics is one of the most emerging technologies today, and are used in a variety of applications, ranging from complex rocket technology to monitoring of crops in agriculture. Robots can be exceptionally useful in a smart hospital environment provided that they are equipped with improved vision capabilities for detection and avoidance of obstacles present in their path, thus allowing robots to perform their tasks without any disturbance. In the particular case of Autonomous Nursing Robots, major essential issues are effective robot path planning for the delivery of medicines to patients, measuring the patient body parameters through sensors, interacting with and informing the patient, by means of voice-based modules, about the doctors visiting schedule, his/her body parameter details, etc. This paper presents an approach of a complete Autonomous Nursing Robot which supports all the aforementioned tasks. In this paper, we present a new Autonomous Nursing Robot system capable of operating in a smart hospital environment area. The objective of the system is to identify the patient room, perform robot path planning for the delivery of medicines to a patient, and measure the patient body parameters, through a wireless BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) beacon receiver and the BLE beacon transmitter at the respective patient rooms. Assuming that a wireless beacon is kept at the patient room, the robot follows the beacon's signal, identifies the respective room and delivers the needed medicine to the patient. A new fuzzy controller system which consists of three ultrasonic sensors and one camera is developed to detect the optimal robot path and to avoid the robot collision with stable and moving obstacles. The fuzzy controller effectively detects obstacles in the robot's vicinity and makes proper decisions for avoiding them. The navigation of the robot is implemented on a BLE tag module by using the AOA (Angle of Arrival) method. The robot uses sensors to measure the patient body parameters and updates these data to the hospital patient database system in a private cloud mode. It also makes uses of a Google assistant to interact with the patients. The robotic system was implemented on the Raspberry Pi using Matlab 2018b. The system performance was evaluated on a PC with an Intel Core i5 processor, while the solar power was used to power the system. Several sensors, namely HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, Logitech HD 720p image sensor, a temperature sensor and a heart rate sensor are used together with a camera to generate datasets for testing the proposed system. In particular, the system was tested on operations taking place in the context of a private hospital in Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu, India. A detailed comparison is performed, through some performance metrics, such as Correlation, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), against the related works of Deepu et al., Huh and Seo, Chinmayi et al., Alli et al., Xu, Ran et al., and Lee et al. The experimental system validation showed that the fuzzy controller achieves very high accuracy in obstacle detection and avoidance, with a very low computational time for taking directional decisions. Moreover, the experimental results demonstrated that the robotic system achieves superior accuracy in detecting/avoiding obstacles compared to other systems of similar purposes presented in the related works.
Keywords: Bluetooth low energy beacon; Fuzzy logic; Raspberry pi; Robotics; Smart hospital; Ultrasonic sensor; Wireless beacon network.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021.