Our CoBot robots follow a novel symbiotic autonomy, in which the robots are aware of their perceptual, physical, and reasoning limitations and proactively ask for help from humans, for example for object manipulation actions. (The CoBot robots, at this time, do not have arms.)
We pursue research in particular in effective real-time mobile robot localization and navigation algorithms, symbiotic human-robot interaction, and multi-task multi-robot dynamic task planning. The CoBot robots are capable of reliably autonomously localization and navigation in our buildings (Gates Hillman Center and Newell and Simon Hall) using the Kinect depth-camera, WiFi, and/or LIDAR.
We first released one of our CoBot robots, CoBot-2, to all the residents of GHC on September 23, 2011. In its first 3 hours of operation, from 1pm to 4pm, its schedule was completely booked.
