Enabling robots to find and fetch objects by querying the web

Abstract

This paper describes an algorithm that enables a mobile robot to find an arbitrary object and take it to a destination location. Previous approaches have been able to search for a fixed set of objects. In contrast, our approach is able to dynamically construct a cost function to find any object by querying the web. The performance of our approach has been evaluated in a realistic simulator, and has been demonstrated on a companion robot, which can successfully execute plans such as finding a coffee and taking it to a destination location like, Gates-Hillman Center, Room 7002.