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Towards embodied intelligence: core technology challenges for unmanned cleaning robots

Release Date: 2024.12.05

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In the 1980s, roboticist Hans Moravec made the interesting observation that "low-level sensing and motor skills are rather more difficult for robots to achieve, while high-level cognitive tasks are relatively simple."

This is the Moravec paradox - while AIs excel at complex cognitive tasks (e.g., playing chess, logical reasoning), they are clumsy at seemingly simple sensory and motor tasks. This is because human perceptual and motor abilities have evolved biologically over millions of years and are far more basic and complex than our logical reasoning abilities.

This problem is particularly acute in unmanned cleaning robots:

What appears to be a simple cleaning task actually involves complex environmental perception, fine-grained control, and dynamic decision-making. Therefore, traditional programming and computation alone is not enough to make a robot work efficiently, but true intelligence needs to go deeper into the interaction between the robot and the real physical world (i.e., the sanitation environment), which is the core concept of Embodied Intelligence.

KUSA Technology, as a practitioner of this concept, is committed to realising deep interaction and intelligent decision-making between unmanned cleaning robots and their environment to ensure that they maintain efficient performance in complex and changing scenarios.

We have summarised the following three core technical challenges to achieve embodied intelligence:

Multimodal perception and real-time feedback

This is an important component of embodied intelligence, allowing robots to dynamically perceive complex environments.

Based on multimodal perception, robots are able to use multiple senses to fully understand their surroundings as humans do.

By integrating vision cameras, LiDAR and infrared cameras, the robot is able to perceive its surroundings in different dimensions, enabling it to manage the quality of its work in a refined manner, while a real-time feedback system ensures that the robot is able to respond flexibly to changes in the dynamic environment.


KUSA Technology's unmanned cleaning robots use AI vision sensors as the core of perception, and the vision sensors are distributed in different positions of the robot to ensure dead-angle-free coverage, so that the robot can comprehensively and accurately capture information about the surrounding environment.


Distribution of body cameras


In actual operation, once the robot detects an obstacle, it will quickly process the sensor data to generate the optimal path planning to avoid collision; in addition, the end side can continuously monitor the cleaning effect, identify and make up for the uncleaned area to ensure the safety and continuity of the operation.


Comparison of front and rear camera shots

In order to better cope with complex scenes, KUSA Technology innovatively adopts a non-uniformly distributed OCC occupancy network - transforming sensed environmental data into a structured occupancy grid map and dynamically adjusting the grid density according to the complexity of the scene. By modelling the dynamics of the scene in a refined way, the robot is able to make accurate decisions while streamlining its computing power and improving its overall operational efficiency.

Non-uniformly distributed OCC occupancy network

Integration of Force Control and Haptic Sensing

This is a core element of embodied intelligence, allowing robots to better interact with their environment.

Just as humans rely on multiple senses to perceive their environment, not just vision, KUSA Technology's unmanned cleaning robots are equipped with vision sensors as well as integratedhaptic sensors - such as force sensors, angle sensors, gyroscopes, and accelerometers. These sensors collect real-time environmental data and robot status information to ensure efficient operation in complex and changing environments.


To ensure the accuracy of the data, the data collected by the sensors are pre-processed, such as de-noising, filtering and normalisation, to ensure the accuracy and consistency of the information; the processed data are then feature extracted by neural networks, allowing the robot to recognise environmental features and analyse the current state.


Based on a large number of annotated datasets from reality and generative AI simulations, the deep learning model will conduct extensive training on force control strategies for different environments to improve the robot's generalised reasoning ability, so as to better cope with all kinds of complexities encountered in operations.



Force control training logic


In actual operation, real-time sensor data will be input into the trained model, which will instantly predict the appropriate force control strategy according to the current environment state and precisely execute the corresponding action through the controller. At the same time, the force sensors continuously monitor the force exerted by the robot during operation, transmit the feedback data to the control system, and dynamically optimise the control strategy according to the actual situation to ensure that the robot is equipped with an adaptive and independent sweeping disc that can be executed in place.


Just as a human being adjusts the force when touching an object, the tactile sensors enable the robot to be sensitive to changes in the environment and precisely adjust its sweeping action. For example, when sweeping close to edges, the robot automatically adjusts its force to avoid excessive disc intrusion, thus reducing wear and prolonging service life.


Through continuous monitoring and dynamic feedback, the robot forms a closed loop of perception-decision-execution, ensuring efficient and reliable operation in complex environments.


Adaptive and Reinforcement Learning Capability

This is the key to embodied intelligence, allowing the robot to adapt to various complex environments.

With perception and control, unmanned cleaning robots are one learning capability away from becoming embodied intelligences - enabling the robots to autonomously adjust their decision-making strategies based on real-time environmental data and historical experience, rather than relying on fixed presets.


Reinforcement learning plays a crucial role in this process. Through continuous interaction with the environment, the robot is able to learn the optimal strategy for different scenarios. For example, during the cleaning process, the robot accumulates operational data, identifies the pattern of rubbish distribution, and gradually optimises the cleaning path to improve cleaning efficiency; the intelligent cloud control platform further enhances the robot's self-optimisation capability.


Robot self-optimisation process


In actual operation, the robot uploads real-time sensory data to the intelligent cloud control platform; the platform analyses a large amount of historical data to provide the robot with optimisation suggestions and update the cleaning strategy; the robot then adjusts and iteratively optimises its own decision-making mode based on the feedback from the platform.


This combination of self-adaptive and reinforcement learning capabilities makes the robot no longer a simple automation tool, but an intelligent body with the ability to evolve itself.


Through data analysis and real-time monitoring, the robot can ensure that the quality of work strictly follows the sanitation assessment standards, and guarantee the continuity and consistency of work through real-time monitoring. In addition, the intelligent cloud control platform provides detailed feedback and assessment of the quality of the work, improving decision-making efficiency and achieving perfect integration with the requirements of the cleaning operation.


Robot in the process of operation


Conclusion

With the continuous development of technology, unmanned cleaning robots are gradually getting rid of the limitations of traditional automation and moving towards the era of true intelligence. In the future, KUSA Technology will continue to deepen the embodied intelligence technology, not only in the field of unmanned cleaning, but also in more complex scenarios to achieve the depth of interaction between the robot and the environment, to provide more intelligent solutions for urban services.

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