A novel automatic meal delivery system

Abstract

Since the rapid growth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0), robots have been widely used in many applications. In the catering industry, robots are used to replace people to do routine jobs. Because meal is an important part of the catering industry, we aim to design and develop a robot to deliver meals for saving cost and improving a restaurant’s performance in this paper. However, for the existing meal delivery system, the guests must make their meals by themselves. To let the food delivery system become more user-friendly, we integrate an automatic guided vehicle (AGV) and a robotic arm to deliver a meal and put it on a table efficiently. The system consists of four phases. In the first stage, since most food feeding environments are indoors, we must build a map of an environment for a robot and use a laser sensor to construct a surrounding object’s real science. The second stage is global planning. The map is used for indoor navigation by computing the shortest path from the starting point to the map’s end point. The third phase is regional planning for obstacle avoidance, immediate avoidance, and re-planning of obstacles on the path. The last stage is how to control a robot arm to grab and put a meal on a table. We use an icon as the hint of the height of a table and operate the arm rotation angle according to this icon’s position. Our system provides the concept of an AGV combined with a robotic arm and provides a service for the food delivery system. In this way, waiters do not spend time dealing with meals and guests can automatically obtain their meals. The result shows that the proposed system will be helpful for the robot industry and the catering industry.