Thanks to the efforts of the robotics and autonomous systems community, robots are becoming ever more capable. There is also an increasing demand from end-users for autonomous service robots that can operate in real environments for extended periods. In the STRANDS project we are tackling this demand head-on by integrating state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and robotics research into mobile service robots, and deploying these systems for long-term installations in security and care environments. Over four deployments, our robots have been operational for a combined duration of 104 days autonomously performing end-user defined tasks, covering 116km in the process. In this article we describe the approach we have used to enable long-term autonomous operation in everyday environments, and how our robots are able to use their long run times to improve their own performance

Abstract-Autonomous systems will play an essential role in many applications across diverse domains including space, marine, air, field, road, and service robotics. They will assist us in our daily routines and perform dangerous, dirty and dull tasks. However, enabling robotic systems to perform autonomously in complex, real-world scenarios over extended time periods (i.e. weeks, months, or years) poses many challenges. Some of these have been investigated by sub-disciplines of Artificial Intelligence (AI) including navigation & mapping, perception, knowledge representation & reasoning, planning, interaction, and learning. The different sub-disciplines have developed techniques that, when re-integrated within an autonomous system, can enable robots to operate effectively in complex, long-term scenarios. In this paper, we survey and discuss AI techniques as 'enablers' for long-term robot autonomy, current progress in integrating these techniques within long-running robotic systems, and the future challenges and opportunities for AI in long-term autonomy.

Abstract-The vision of the RoboEarth project is to design a knowledge-based system to provide web and cloud services that can transform a simple robot into an intelligent one. In this work we describe the RoboEarth semantic mapping system. The semantic map is composed of (1) an ontology to code the concepts and relations in maps and objects, and (2) a SLAM map providing the scene geometry and the object locations with respect to the robot. We propose to ground the terminological knowledge in the robot perceptions by means of the SLAM map of objects. RoboEarth boosts mapping by providing: (1) a subdatabase of object models relevant for the task at hand, obtained by semantic reasoning, which improves recognition by reducing computation and the false positive rate; (2) the sharing of semantic maps between robots, and (3) software as a service to externalize in the cloud the more intensive mapping computations, while meeting the mandatory hard real time constraints of the robot.To demonstrate the RoboEarth cloud mapping system, we investigate two action recipes that embody semantic map building in a simple mobile robot. The first recipe enables semantic map building for a novel environment while exploiting available prior information about the environment. The second recipe searches for a novel object, with the efficiency boosted thanks to the reasoning on a semantically annotated map. Our experimental results demonstrate that by using RoboEarth cloud services, a simple robot can reliably and efficiently build the semantic maps needed to perform its quotidian tasks. In addition, we show the synergetic relation of the SLAM map of objects that grounds the terminological knowledge coded in the ontology.Note to Practitioners-RoboEarth is a cloud-based knowledge base for robots that transforms a simple robot into an intelligent one thanks to the web services provided. As mapping is a mandatory element on most of the robot systems, we focus on the RoboEarth semantic mapping for robot systems, showing the benefits of the combination of SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Map building), and knowledge-based reasoning. We show the qualities of our system by means of two experiments: (1) building a map of a novel environment boosted by prior information and (2) efficient searching for a novel object thanks to the knowledgebased reasoning techniques. We can conclude that RoboEarth enables the execution of the proposed methods as web and cloud services that enable advanced perception in a simple robot.

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Autonomous household robots are supposed to accomplish complex tasks like cleaning the dishes which involve both navigation and manipulation within the environment. For navigation, spatial information is mostly sufficient, but manipulation tasks raise the demand for deeper knowledge about objects, such as their types, their functions, or the way how they can be used. We present KNOWROB-MAP, a system for building environment models for robots by combining spatial information about objects in the environment with encyclopedic knowledge about the types and properties of objects, with common-sense knowledge describing what the objects can be used for, and with knowledge derived from observations of human activities by learning statistical relational models. In this paper, we describe the concept and implementation of KNOWROB-MAP and present several examples demonstrating the range of information the system can provide to autonomous robots.