Introduction
Medical personnel regularly put themselves at risk of infection to protect patients, a fact that everyone has been acutely aware of during the COVID-19 pandemic. Development of an autonomous robot for hospital environment aiming to reduce the risk of the health care workers at their work has exponentially increased in the ongoing pandemic. Sahayak, a COVID aid bot that is capable of navigating autonomously in simulated static environments. The aim is to provide a general framework for developing medical assistive robots. A prototype of Sahayak was successfully deployed at AIIMS Nagpur.
Mechanical Design
- To enable smooth motion, a 4-wheel drive design was adopted. Sahayak has a payload capacity of 20 Kg and is driven by four planetary DC geared motors.
- It also includes heavy-duty disc wheels and 20Ah lithium-ion battery to power the motors.
- The prototype of Sahayak included a Jetson Nano for computation.
- A A2M8 2D LiDAR and an Intel RealSense R200 was mounted on the model.
Previous Work
Pipeline Overview
Pipeline
Visual Odometry

- Visual Odometry was computed through 3D-2D and 3D-3D motion estimation methods by using a sparse optical flow-based feature tracking approach.
- This odometry information was fused with the IMU readings using an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF).
Visual Odometry
Real-Time Appearance-Based mapping

- As 3D localization and Motion planning was not required 2D grid map was required
- Dijkstras Algorithm was used as Global Planner
- Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) planner was used as Local Planner.
- This came bundled in Nav Stack
Motion Planning Using Nav-Stack
Team
Karthik Raman
Prathamesh RInge
Sania Subhedar
Sushlok Shah
Yagnesh Devada
Aayush Fadia
Kushagra Srivastva
Varad Vaidya
Harshad Zade
Anshul Paigwar
Ajinkya Kamat
Prathamesh RInge
Sania Subhedar
Sushlok Shah
Yagnesh Devada
Aayush Fadia
Kushagra Srivastva
Varad Vaidya
Harshad Zade
Anshul Paigwar
Ajinkya Kamat