Implementation of Omni-D Tele-Presence Robot Using Kalman Filter and Tricon Ultrasonic Sensors

Abstract

The tele-presence robot is designed to set forth an economic solution to facilitate day-to-day normal activities in almost every field. There are several solutions to design tele-presence robots, e.g., Skype and team viewer, but it is pretty inappropriate to use Skype and extra hardware. Therefore, in this article, we have presented a robust implementation of the tele-presence robot. Our proposed omnidirectional tele-presence robot consists of (i) Tricon ultrasonic sensors, (ii) Kalman filter implementation and control, and (iii) integration of our developed WebRTC-based application with the omnidirectional tele-presence robot for video transmission. We present a new algorithm to encounter the sensor noise with the least number of sensors for the estimation of Kalman filter. We have simulated the complete model of robot in Simulink and Matlab for the tough paths and critical hurdles. The robot successfully prevents the collision and reaches the destination. The mean errors for the estimation of position and velocity are 5.77% and 2.04%. To achieve efficient and reliable video transmission, the quality factors such as resolution, encoding, average delay and throughput are resolved using the WebRTC along with the integration of the communication protocols. To protect the data transmission, we have implemented the SSL protocol and installed it on the server. We tested three different cases of video resolutions (i.e., 320×280, 820×460 and 900×590) for the performance evaluation of the video transmission. For the highest resolution, our TPR takes 3.5 ms for the encoding, and the average delay is 2.70 ms with 900 × 590 pixels.

Keywords

• omnidirectional robot
• tele-presence robot
• Kalman filter
• Tricon ultrasonic sensors