KeJia: towards an autonomous service robot with tolerance of unexpected environmental changes

Abstract

KeJia is a domestic service robot, consisting of a mobile base, an arm, two cameras, and a set of software components for perception, manipulation, natural language understanding, motion and task planning, and decision making. With on-line running of these functions, a robot can adapt to dynamic environments which may have unexpected changes. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical method which combines motion planning with a neural network, so that the robot can tolerate errors from sensors, wear of parts, and human disturbances during motion execution. We evaluate our work on KeJia that cooks popcorn using a microwave oven, where humans try to disturb KeJia during the operation.