Autonomous medication delivery system implemented with subsumption architecture and fail-safe control based on lego NXT 1.0 prototype.

Abstract

The drug delivery system presented in this thesis envisions autonomous systems which will deliver inside hospitals medication to the patients without any fault or mistake. The drug delivery prototype robot can autonomously deliver from the pharmacy dispenser a medication to a current bed. The development of such an autonomous system has many benefits. It can reduce the scheduled delivery of medication to the patients from the nurses in order to increase the productivity of their timetable. In this case the nurses can give more care to some patients. But the development of such system must be strict, with respect to safety issues because we use this in association with human beings and there is no tolerance to hazards, because the result will be catastrophic. So, a system like that must be fail-safe. For this reason, a fault tree analysis is used in order to eliminate any possible fault or lead to a fail-safe state, may happen in such autonomous system, ensuring a safe operation. Fault tree analysis is a widespread approach for analyzing reliability and safety. Furthermore in this thesis, subsumption architecture is used in order to implement the JAVA code with behavior programming that runs into the drug delivery prototype robot. There are many advantages in this type of programming. The prototype design we use for the Lego NXT.1 system is based on the original Forklift Design. To sum up, in this thesis we present an autonomous robotic system, which can deliver medicines from one point to the patient bed and give it to the patient safely in addition with the actions taken to ensure safe operation without faults.