Commercial indoor spaces including hospitals, hotels, warehouses, offices, etc. offer great potential for commercial exploitation of logistic robotics. Such spaces provide inherent advantages for robotics solutions deployment, since they are required by law to meet stringent building codes, and therefore the navigation space exhibits some structure, which favours autonomous navigation. In addition, they offer reliable communication infrastructures, a prerequisite for normal business operation. Thus, commercial spaces are rightfully considered the next great field of logistic robotics deployment. Despite these advantages, today, only a few solutions exist, which have not triggered widespread acceptance by the market. This is because existing systems require costly infrastructure installation (arrays of peripheral sensors, mapping, etc.); they do not easily integrate to corporate IT solutions and as a result, they do not fully automate procedures and traceability; they are limited to a single type of service, i.e. transfer of goods. Through transfer of knowledge, multidisciplinary research and cross-fertilization between academia and industry, ENDORSE has addressed the aforementioned technical hurdles. Four innovation pillars were pursued: (i) infrastructure-less multi-robot navigation, i.e. minimum (if any) installation of sensors and communications buses inside the building for the localization of robots, targets and docking stations; (ii) advanced HRI for resolving deadlocks and achieving efficient sharing of space resources in crowded spaces; (iii) deployment of the ENDORSE software as a cloud-based service facilitating its integration with corporate software solutions such as ERP, CRM, etc.; (iv) reconfigurable and modular hardware architectures so that diverse modules can be easily swapped.
The modular architecture was successfully demonstrated and validated by the integration of an e-diagnostic support module, equipped with non-invasive sensors/devices, and the Electronic Health Records (EHR) interfacing, thus serving as an autonomous mobile e-health diagnostic robotic module.
The latter mobile e-health diagnostic module allows remote patient monitoring and vital signs acquisition and facilitates full connectivity to a dedicated inpatient-monitoring platform. In addition, the data produced by the e-diagnostic module diagnostic exam report are securely forwarded to update and complement the patient’s cloud-based EHR.
The integrated ENDORSE solution comprising a fleet of autonomous mobile robots and the ENDORSE Fleet Management System has been deployed and successfully tested in full-scale lab-controlled environment replicating typical health centres. The evaluation conducted emphasised the good performance of the ENDORSE solution as regarding time-to-deployment and operational dependability.
