AI-based Office Assisting Robot

Although we mostly rely on digital platforms and tools these days, we still depend on people for sharing various objects like a document and similar objects from one place to another between employees of an unstructured indoor office environment. For this purpose, we are proposing a mobile AI-based autonomous Office Assistant Robot, which can be assigned various tasks such as sharing a document or similar objects between two people sitting at a distance from each other in an indoor office environment. The robot uses sensors for detecting obstacles. It uses a differential drive mechanism for moving in the office. It has a single onboard computer. We have used free, open-source software and cost-effective sensors and materials to build a low-cost but precisely functioning robot. Our system comprises four units: one that processes sensor data, one which helps the robot in navigating in a dynamic environment, one that controls part of the office assistant robot system, and the last is the mobile application which is used for communication with the robot. We have used Robotic Operating System (ROS) Melodic as the ground operating system in the background of the Ubuntu Operating System. The robot can move autonomously in the office environment with the help of the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm. The results showed that the robot was able to reach the goal location 99% of the time in the dynamic environment. Finally, we came to the conclusion that the robot could work very efficiently in a dynamic environment.