Xavier: An Autonomous Mobile Robot on the Web

摘要

For the past three years, we have been running an experiment in web-based interaction with an autonomous indoor mobile robot. The robot, Xavier, can accept commands to travel to different offices in our building, broadcasting camera images as it travels. The experiment, which was originally designed to test a new navigation algorithm, has proven very successful, with over 30,000 requests received and 210 kilometers travelled, to date. This article describes the autonomous robot system, the web-based interfaces, and how they communicate with the robot. It highlights lessons learned during this experiment in web-based robotics and includes recommendations for putting future mobile robots on the web. Introduction In December 1995, we began what we assumed would be a short (two to three month) experiment to demonstrate the reliability of a new algorithm that we had developed for autonomous indoor navigation [12]. To provide a continual source of commands to the robot, we set up a web pag...