Giving Autonomy to Empty‐Headed Robots: Design and Deployment Challenges

ABSTRACT This paper presents a 3D LiDAR‐based autonomy‐transferring platform designed to enable autonomy for legacy non‐autonomous robots and to address difficulties encountered at industrial systems. The proposed platform integrates essential hardware and core software modules for perception, decision‐making, and control, ensuring adaptability across various industrial applications. It primarily consists of three key hardware components: perception sensors, a computation board, and a protective case, providing a comprehensive turnkey solution that facilitates seamless integration into existing navigation‐free robots. The software architecture processes synchronized sensor data to support perception, planning, and control functionalities, ultimately generating velocity commands for autonomous navigation. By enabling real‐time intelligence, the proposed system contributes to scalable smart city applications and industrial IoT deployments. Comparative evaluations with existing commercial solutions highlight the limitations of current autonomy platforms and demonstrate how the proposed platform effectively addresses these constraints. The platform's interoperability was validated across diverse robotic and cyber‐physical environment in industry, logistics, research, and retail. And then, to systematically assess its performance, two types of evaluations were conducted: one focused on harsh environments and another across four fields and practical industrial applications in smart retail, logistics hubs, and urban mobility systems. The results confirm the platform's scalability, flexibility, and effectiveness, establishing it as a viable solution for real‐world autonomy implementation. The proposed autonomy‐supporting platform serves as a valuable reference for implementing autonomy in non‐autonomous robotic systems, advancing the transformation toward cyber‐physical environment across smart infrastructure.