A Tea-Serving Robot for Office Environment

Abstract:
This paper provides implementation details of a tea-serving robot designed to operate reliably in an office environment where the robot has to move in a restricted space available between the desks. The robot has multiple modes of operation and has several capabilities like following a coloured-line marked on the floor, following a person, detecting hands approaching the tray, detecting an empty tray and avoiding obstacles. The emphasis of this work has been on improving the robustness and reliability of the whole system. A rigorous quantitative performance analysis is carried out to demonstrate the efficacy of the system.