CoBots: Robust Symbiotic Autonomous Mobile Service Robots

Abstract

We research and develop autonomous mobile service robots as Collaborative Robots, ie, CoBots. For the last three years, our four CoBots have autonomously navigated in our multi-floor office buildings for more than 1,000 km, as the result of the integration of multiple perceptual, cognitive, and actuations representations and algorithms. In this paper, we identify a few core aspects of our CoBots underlying their robust functionality. The reliable mobility in the varying indoor environments comes from a novel episodic non-Markov localization. Service tasks requested by users are the input to a scheduler that can consider different types of constraints, including transfers among multiple robots. With symbiotic autonomy, the CoBots proactively seek external sources of help to fill-in for their inevitable occasional limitations. We present sampled results from a deployment and conclude with a brief review of other features of our service robots.