Development and experimental evaluation of a low-cost ROS2-enabled autonomous carrier robot for structured factory automation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15282/isse.1.1.2026.14255Keywords:
Smart product carrier, Factory automation, Robot operating system, Autonomous mobile robot, Industry 4.0Abstract
The growing demand for flexible, safe, and cost-effective material handling systems has accelerated the adoption of intelligent automation technologies in modern manufacturing environments. Conventional conveyor-based and manual transport systems often lack adaptability and require significant infrastructure modification when production layouts change. This study presents the development and experimental evaluation of a low-cost Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) enabled autonomous carrier robot designed for structured factory automation applications. The proposed system integrates a Raspberry Pi 4 and distributed ESP32 microcontrollers with ultrasonic, infrared, and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) sensors to support line-following navigation, obstacle avoidance, platform identification, and real-time inter-robot communication. A hybrid communication framework combining ROS2 and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) publish–subscribe architecture was implemented to enable coordinated task execution between multiple carrier robots and a central control node. Experimental evaluations were conducted in a controlled indoor factory-like environment to assess navigation performance, obstacle avoidance reliability, RFID detection accuracy, and communication latency under various operating conditions. The results showed that the optimized navigation configuration achieved a 90% success rate during repeated trials, while the reverse-and-forward obstacle avoidance strategy demonstrated 100% reliability under structured path conditions. In addition, the proposed system achieved stable RFID-based platform recognition and effective multi-carrier coordination with low communication latency. These findings demonstrate that the proposed autonomous carrier robot provides a practical and affordable solution for structured factory transport applications, particularly for small and medium-sized manufacturing facilities. The modular ROS2-MQTT architecture also supports future expansion toward more advanced Industry 4.0-enabled factory automation systems.
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