Design and Implementation of an Autonomous Delivery Robot for Restaurant Services

Abstract

Technology advancement especially in the field of robotics has cut through every facet of human endeavours. For instance, service robots are now employed in human environment to assist in performing tasks and making our daily lives more comfortable. Restaurant service is not exempted from this, as recently robots have been employed to carry out tasks including ordering, fetching, delivering & billing, in the restaurant to make service delivery smarter and more efficient. This study addresses the challenges in a traditional restaurant setting by introducing a delivery robot as a waiter and a wireless system of placing orders. The study presents a line following delivery robot utilizing a programmed Arduino module to deliver an item (cup of drink up to 300gram weight) from Kitchen to the table from which the request was made. The robot is equipped with an RFID reader to detect a tag at table location (target). An android application was also developed for placing orders from customer’s smartphone via a Bluetooth module placed in the kitchen. The performance of the robot was evaluated to determine the effectiveness of the table detection with the RFID proposed technique. A promising result was observed with close proximity to target with an average error of 5% recorded.