This is a project meant to become the product of Unmanned Life. It started with a very basic in-house robot for a proof of concept with PostNL.
It was the most basic platform to run: Wooden plate with motors, ultrasound sensors for collision prevention and parcel detection and WiFi in a nice case.
The hardware design was then outsourced to Quimesis (Belgium) which provided the prototypes for SwissPost and an alternative version was also produced from Unsupervised.AI.
In this project, I was in charge of software development.
Features implemented:
- Motor control (Arduino then Roboteq SBL2360)
- Collision prevention (Ultrasound then 2D Lidar)
- Path planning (Fixed setups then WebUI to define the inputs/outputs)
- Robot navigation (Fixed setups then paths selected depending on current usage)
- Parcel detection (Ultrasound then IR detectors)
- Multi-robot environment (Grid latching system)
- UWB-based localization (Pozyx TWR then Bitcraze custom TDoA)
- GUI (PyQT then Web interface using Vue.JS)
This solution won multiple awards:
- The Start-up Postal Innovation award, PostExpo 2017 with PostNL
- The Postal Innovation award, PostExpo 2018 with SwissPost