The STRANDS Project: Long-Term Autonomy in Everyday Environments

Abstract

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

On the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for autonomous object modeling

“…Further, we collect data at the viewpoints computed and we extract one object model for each experiment. 1 We compare our results qualitatively with the results obtained by [2], where a mobile robot was used to acquire views and build models of the objects autonomously. Two types of experiments were performed in [2]: controlled and uncontrolled.…”

“…[1] report deploying mobile robots in unstructured environments (offices and elderly care homes) for durations of up to 6 months. Such experiments are pushing the boundaries of what these systems are capable of, and widen the frontier to the next set of issues to be addressed, such as exposure to large amounts of data, learning patterns about the environment, life-long robust localization and navigation, etc.…”

Augmenting Knowledge through Statistical, Goal-oriented Human-Robot Dialog

“…Results of survey papers from participants, including four statements with Likert-scale responses.on average. Despite the quantitative improvements, there was no significant difference observed from the scores collected from the survey prompts 2. …”

Warped Hypertime Representations for Long-Term Autonomy of Mobile Robots

“…Advances in autonomous robotics are gradually enabling deployment of robots in human-populated environments [1]. Human activity tends to cause changes to the environments it takes place in, and the mobile robots that share these environments need to be able to cope with such never-ending changes.…”

“…Many authors have shown that even simple models of the environment that adapt to changes improve the overall ability of mobile robots to operate over longer time periods [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. Moreover, the ability of long-term autonomous operation improves the chances of observing the temporal changes, and thus to extract more valuable information about the environment dynamics, resulting in more accurate spatio-temporal models [1].…”