Design of a Patrol Robot Based on the Plug-In Service Architecture

Abstract

In areas that require heavy patrol tasks, the deployment of robots rather than humans can effectively reduce operating costs while also ensuring safety in high-risk environments. Recently, patrol robots have primarily worked in high-risk scenarios such as power equipment inspection and mining fields. However, the surging demand from the market urgently asks for the flexibility of patrol robots' architecture, which can enable simple customization of the system. Meanwhile, as a software service architecture, the plug-in design makes the platform lightweight, provides gadget slots, and helps to promote application system ecology. This paper introduces a plug-in-based design that adopts a three-layer architecture of hardware-end, back-end, and front-end to realize a patrol robot system with good maintainability and reusability. The plug-in architecture flexibly extends fundamental patrol functions with various gadgets to meet customer demands. Experiments show the versatility of an implemented robot system based on the proposed architecture.