Vertical gardens have emerged alongside the increase in urban density and land scarcity to reintegrate greenery in the built environment. Existing maintenance for vertical gardens is labour-intensive, time-consuming and is being increasingly complemented by robotic applications. While research has been focused on enhancing robot design to improve productivity, minimal effort has been done on ‘design for robots’ in creating suitable environments for optimal robot deployments. This paper proposed a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together architects, designers, and roboticians to adapt the design of the vertical garden infrastructure to counteract the limitations of the maintenance robot. A case study on an existing plant maintenance robot ‘Urodela’ was conducted to determine the limitations encountered by robotic aid during operation. A robot-inclusive modular design for vertical gardens is proposed based on robot-inclusive principles, namely manipulability and safety, along with architectural design considerations. Design explorations for different configurations of track layouts of the proposed robot-inclusive modular design for vertical gardens is further analysed to validate its applicability and scalability.

False ceilings are often utilised in residential and commercial spaces as a way to contain and conceal necessary but unattractive building infrastructure, including mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services. Concealing such elements has made it difficult to perform periodic inspection safely for maintenance. To complement this, there have been increasing research interests in mobile robots in recent years that are capable of accessing hard-to-reach locations, thus allowing workers to perform inspections remotely. However, current initiatives are met with challenges arising from unstructured site conditions that hamper the robot’s productivity for false ceiling inspection. The paper adopts a top-down approach known as “Design for Robots”, taking into account four robot-inclusive design principles: activity, accessibility, safety, observability. Falcon, a class of inspection robots, was used as a benchmark to identify spatial constraints according to the four principles. Following this, a list of false ceiling design guidelines for each category are proposed.

Mobile service robots employ vision systems to discern objects in their workspaces for navigation or object detection. The lighting conditions of the surroundings affect a robot’s ability to discern and navigate in its work environment. Robot inclusivity principles can be used to determine the suitability of a site’s lighting condition for robot performance. This paper proposes a novel framework for autonomously auditing the Robot Inclusivity Index of indoor environments based on the lighting condition (RII-lux). The framework considers the factors of light intensity and the presence of glare to define the RII-Lux of a particular location in an environment. The auditing framework is implemented on a robot to autonomously generate a heatmap visually representing the variation in RII-Lux of an environment. The applicability of the proposed framework for generating true-to-life RII-Lux heatmaps has been validated through experimental results.

Mobile service robots often have to work in dynamic and cluttered environments. Multiple safety hazards exist for robots in such work environments, which visual sensors may not detect in time before collisions or robotic damage. An alternative hazard alert system using tactile methods is explored to pre-emptively convey surrounding spatial information to robots working in complex environments or under poor lighting conditions. The proposed method for robot-inclusive tactile paving is known as Passive Auto-Tactile Heuristic (PATH) tiles. These robot-inclusive tactile paving tiles are implemented in spatial infrastructure and are aimed to allow robots to pre-emptively recognize surrounding hazards even under poor lighting conditions and potentially provide improved hazard cues to visually impaired people. A corresponding Tactile Sensing Module (TSM) was used for the digital interpretation of the PATH tiles and was mounted onboard a mobile audit robot known as Meerkat. The experiment yielded a 71.6% improvement in pre-emptive hazard detection capabilities with the TSM using a customized Graph Neural Network (GNN) model.

Mobile service robots experience excessive vibrations when travelling over uneven surfaces in their workspace, increasing the degradation rate of the mechanical components or disrupting the robot’s sensing abilities for proper localization and navigational capabilities. Robot inclusivity principles can determine the suitability of a site for robot performance by considering the ground’s unevenness. This paper proposes a novel framework to autonomously evaluate the Robot Inclusivity Level of buildings based on surface unevenness (RIL-SU) by quantifying the surface unevenness of floor surfaces. The surface unevenness values are converted to RIL-SU using a rule-based approach, and the corresponding RIL-SU is tagged to the map location. A coloured heatmap based on the RIL-SU values is created as a visual representation of the RIL-SU of a given space. This heatmap would be useful for modifying the environment to make it more robot-friendly or restrict the robot’s operation in certain areas to avoid possible robot failures. The experimental results show that the proposed framework can successfully generate a valid RIL-SU heatmap for building environments.

Navigation is a primary requirement for mobile robots as they encounter hazards during operation. To improve safety for robotic deployments, hazard alert systems could be integrated into their spatial environments to reduce robotic computational load and hardware requirements, while providing benefits to visually-impaired human users in the area. Modified tactile paving markers known as the Passive Auto-Tactile Heuristic (PATH) tiles are configured for robotic usage to aid in their navigation and hazard avoidance along with a specialized Tactile Sensor Module, while providing tactile cues to visually-impaired human users. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for generating standardized layouts of ’safe routes’ from site plans of the robot’s workspace as input. The creation of ’safe routes’ is implemented by extracting site boundaries and outlines of interior obstacles of an input site plan, generating of the site’s Medial Axis (MA) through its connectivity graph and overlaying the corresponding PATH tile types. This implementation is explored using the Rhinoceros3D CAD program, Grasshopper development platform and associated plugins for processing the site plan and visualization of the eventual routes. The algorithm is tested on 5 sites of varying spatial functions for validation.