Communications of the ACM
Carnegie Mellon's Cobot Robots Reach 1,000-Kilometer Milestone of Autonomous Operation
Robots deployed at Carnegie Mellon University have achieved a milestone for indoor autonomous robots.
Credit: CORAL Group, Carnegie Mellon University
Robots deployed in Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) Gates and Hillman centers and Newell-Simon Hall have collectively reached 1,000 kilometers of autonomous operation in a first for indoor autonomous robots.
"We were enthusiastic and daring to set a research agenda to include the actual long-term deployment of autonomous mobile robots in our real building environments," says CMU professor Manuela Veloso, founder of the CoBot project.
For the past three years, three CoBots have been running errands and guiding visitors without human supervision. CMU researchers came up with new solutions for navigation, such as a localization algorithm capable of handling static elements such as walls and short-term elements whose positions vary, such as chairs and tables, and distinguish them from dynamic elements, such as moving people. The CoBots have operated without a single incident--they have never rolled over a person's foot, run into a wall, or been confused by a glass window, for example.
The CoBots are designed to move about in all of the wide spaces in the buildings, ranging from multi-width and multi-angled corridors and hallways to glass bridges, open spaces with unique furniture, and crowded cafe areas.
"The scale of the deployment also opened the novel challenge of collecting and understanding data about the extensive robots' performance, as we clearly do not follow the robots to observe them," notes CMU student Joydeep Biswas.
From Carnegie Mellon News (PA)
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