A Comprehensive Review on Automatic Mobile Robots: Applications, Perception, Communication and Control

In recent years, automatic mobile robots (AMRs) have been widely concerned in various fields, such as material handling, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cruise, automatic factories and so forth. Compared with traditional robots, an AMR system brings several challenges such as adaptation to the environment, stable communication and robust control. For example, in a complex environment, AMR has to observe the surrounding environment in real time to avoid obstacles, and track the target in real time to change its trajectory until the task is completed, based on an efficient integration of the perception, communication and control. AMR systems require support from various technologies including real-time positioning and navigation, trajectory planning, target tracking, multi-agent systems, robot monitoring and so forth. In order to enable more enhanced applications of AMRs, the geometric adaptability, design characteristics, mobility, flexibility, obstacle avoidance and fault-tolerant control should be further discussed. This paper provides a comprehensive elaboration on the four aspects of AMR systems, namely AMR applications, perception technologies, robot communications and control mechanisms. Future research directions are also pointed out.