Symbiotic-Autonomous Service Robots for User-Requested Tasks in a Multi-Floor Building

Abstract

Although since the days of the Shakey robot, there have been a rich variety of mobile robots, we realize that there were still no general autonomous, unsupervised mobile robots servicing users in our buildings. In this paper, we contribute the algorithms and results of our successful deployment of a service mobile robot agent, CoBot, in our multi-floor office environment. CoBot accepts requests from users, autonomously navigates between floors of the building, and asks for help when needed in a symbiotic relationship with the humans in its environment. We present the details of such challenging deployment, in particular the effective real-time depth-camera based localization and navigation algorithms, the symbiotic human-robot interaction approach, and the multitask dynamic planning and scheduling algorithm. We conclude with a comprehensive analysis of the extensive results of the last two weeks of daily CoBot runs for a total of more than 8.7 km, performing a large varied set of user requests.