Replacing the office intern: An autonomous coffee run with a mobile manipulator

Abstract

We describe our development of an autonomous robotic system that safely navigates through an unmodified campus environment to purchase and deliver a cup of coffee. To accomplish this task, the robot navigates through indoor and outdoor environments, opens heavy spring-loaded doors, calls, enters, and exits an elevator, waits in line with other customers, interacts with coffee shop employees to purchase beverages, and returns to its original location to deliver the beverages. This paper makes four contributions: a robust infrastructure for unifying multiple 2D navigation maps; a process for detecting and opening transparent, heavy spring-loaded doors; algorithms for operating elevators; and software that enables the intuitive passing of objects to and from untrained humans.