Unmanned Systems

Within the past year, I have tortured my self with one after the other DIY projects throughout my house and yard. For this assignment, I will be focusing on the yard work. Every time I do a project, I use it as an opportunity to get a new tool, need to fix railing on steps, that’s going to take a tig welder, not really but luckily my wife doesn’t know any better. Two main projects come to mind and both have a common need. The first one was a privacy fence with 27 posts, and for each of those posts, it required about a bag and a half of concrete. The second was a wooden deck and yes it also required concrete. I convinced my wife that we needed a wheel barrel and after shopping for one and asking why they cost so much even though I had to do all the work, we bought one. It got me thinking that there should be an autonomous one out there but other than one a guy developed for himself there wasn’t any.

Having a UGV wheel barrel would have great potential both for domestic home and commercial use. The concept is not far from being just a smaller version of the autonomous mining dump trucks and a larger version of the robotic mower or vacuum. Both the mower and vacuum have become more prevalent within homes around the country. Two tasks are monotonous and labor-intensive.  For home use, the UGV wheel barrel would make a task such as hauling bags of concrete from a truck bed to the back yard effortless. It would also allow the individual who would be pushing the overweight wheel barrel to do other tasks such as prepping the hole or mixing the concrete while putting up a fence. By doing this time is saved, not wasted and trips to the ER are only for smashed thumbs and not for pulling your back. The same applies to commercial use. Construction work sites could have UGV WB’s hauling debris and supplies back and forth. In a business office, the UGV WB could be used to haul trash to designated dump shoots or even deliver mail and supplies throughout the building. This would solve some personal issues such as longer workday, no background checks or drug testing, no pulling out your back for workmen’s comp and no splinters from wooden handles.

With the growth of private use autonomous commercial products such as the mower, vacuum and RC drones most of the technology is widespread and massed produced bringing down prices. The technology used for spatial awareness could be Wi-Fi signals to triangulate location. The application of using Wi-Fi whether it be a home network or pods sold with the UGV WB is the ability to be used in areas with little to no GPS such as starting from inside the garage or other areas with low GPS signals [1]. The pods sold with the UGV WB could be placed around the yard and used to send out a Wi-Fi signal while using solar to charge or being recharged when putting away. Avoiding objects around the yard and workplace could be done with ping or lidar sensors giving it range and object awareness. A follow-me camera or follow phone/smartwatch worn by an individual would allow the UGV WB to know where to return. The software could also be developed for simple mapping to set a home located in a cartesian coordinates XY like INS [2]. The old know where it was at and knows where it’s not. The last and cheapest methods may be a line following system that you can just put down a cable for it to follow while you work or even a simple programming application that allows you to set the path manually and control other features such as time at location and whether to dump or move after a set load like the robots that teach kids to program. Electric power and an electric motor system would be the best drive system due to power and torque.

For home use and even construction use any big hardware store chain would be a place to sell and even rent a UGV WB.  When it comes to pricing, a robot mower costs 1000 to 5000. A wheel barrel without anything powering it could cost 100 and a powered one cost 500-9000. I don’t believe the tech would cost the most, the majority of the cost will be from the metal frame and metal bucket for durability. It would be easy to compete with the mower prices but hard to justify for something you may only use a few times a year, unlike the mower. Renting may be the best option. If mass-produced to sell in a large chain store, it will take longer to start seeing returns on investment because of the larger investment up front. A large up-front investment could pay off with greater returns due to the mass volume. If it is sold locally at first and then built up if could be a pay off after each sell and a slow build-up to get out to more markets.

[1] Han, X., Kim, H., Jeon, C. W., Moon, H. C., & Kim, J. H. (2017). Development of a low-cost GPS/INS integrated system for tractor automatic navigation. International Journal of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, 10(2), 123-131. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/10.3965/j.ijabe.20171002.307

[2]  A. N. Bishop, A. V. Savkin and P. N. Pathirana, "Vision-Based Target Tracking and Surveillance With Robust Set-Valued State Estimation," in IEEE Signal Processing Letters, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 289-292, March 2010.doi: 10.1109/LSP.2009.2038772