We research and develop autonomous mobile service robots as Collaborative Robots, i.e., CoBots. For the last three years, our four CoBots have autonomously navigated in our multi-floor office buildings for more than 1,000km, as the result of the integration of multiple perceptual, cognitive, and actuations representations and algorithms. In this paper, we identify a few core aspects of our CoBots underlying their robust functionality. The reliable mobility in the varying indoor environments comes from a novel episodic non-Markov localization. Service tasks requested by users are the input to a scheduler that can consider different types of constraints, including transfers among multiple robots. With symbiotic autonomy, the CoBots proactively seek external sources of help to fill-in for their inevitable occasional limitations. We present sampled results from a deployment and conclude with a brief review of other features of our service robots.
['Manuela M. Veloso', 'Joydeep Biswas', 'Brian Coltin', 'Stephanie Rosenthal']
CoBots: robust symbiotic autonomous mobile service robots