An Approach for Opening Doors with a Mobile Robot Using Machine Learning Methods

One of the tasks of robotics is to develop a robot's ability to perform specific actions for as long as possible without human assistance. One such step is to open different types of doors. This task is essential for any operation that involves moving a robot from one room to another. This paper proposes a versatile and computationally efficient algorithm for an autonomous mobile robot opening different types of doors, using machine learning methods. The latter include the YOLOv5 object detection model, the RANSAC iterative method for estimating the mathematical model parameters, and the DBSCAN clustering algorithm. Alternative clustering methods are also compared. The proposed algorithm was explored and tested in simulation and on a real robot manufactured by SOMATIC version Dalek. The percentage of successful doors opened out of the total number of attempts was used as an accuracy metric. The proposed algorithm reached an accuracy of 95% in 100 attempts. The result of testing the door-handle detection algorithm on simulated data was an error of 1.98 mm in 10,000 samples. That is, the average distance from the door handle found by the detector to the real one was 1.98 mm. The proposed algorithm has shown high accuracy and the ability to be applied in real time for opening different types of doors.