We’re developing autonomous service robots that can operate continually in university, office, and home environments. These robots will learn a wide variety of skills involving perception, navigation, control, and multi-robot coordination over their lifetime, serving as a major testbed for continual lifelong machine learning algorithms and mobile manipulation.
During ICRA 2022, we showcased the first demo of real-time lifelong learning on a mobile robot to an audience of conference attendees. The lifelong learning robot ran continuously over two three-hour sessions, learning to perform occupancy prediction of the environment as it was adversarially rearranged.
Penn autonomous service robot (2nd generation) with a Kinova Gen3 arm on a Freight robot base.
Demonstration of real-time lifelong learning for occupancy prediction onboard a mobile robot, at ICRA 2022. The demo ran continuously
for three-hour sessions over two days in front of a live audience.
Our work on autonomous service robots started with developing a fleet of low-cost autonomous service robots that can operate continually around the engineering complex at Penn (Eaton et al., 2016). Visitors to the GRASP lab could be greeted and then taken on a 7-minute tour by the service robots, as shown in the videos below.
Penn Autonomous Service Robot (1st generation)
An earlier version of the autonomous service robot, without its shell, giving a tour to prospective PhD students.
Most current autonomous mobile service robots are
either expensive commercial platforms or custom
manufactured for research environments, limiting
their availability. We present the design for a low-cost
service robot based on the widely used TurtleBot 2
platform, with the goal of making service
robots affordable and accessible to the research, educational,
and hobbyist communities.
Our design uses a set of simple and inexpensive
modifications to transform the TurtleBot 2 into a
4.5ft (1.37m) tall tour-guide or telepresence-style
robot, capable of performing a wide variety of indoor
service tasks. The resulting platform provides
a shoulder-height touchscreen and 3D camera for
interaction, an optional low-cost arm for manipulation,
enhanced onboard computation, autonomous
charging, and up to 6 hours of runtime. The resulting
platform can support many of the tasks
performed by significantly more expensive service
robots. For compatibility with existing software
packages, the service robot runs the Robot Operating
System (ROS).
@inproceedings{Eaton2016Design,author={Eaton, Eric and Mucchiani, Caio and Mohan, Mayumi and Isele, David and Luna, Jose Marcio and Clingerman, Christopher},year={2016},title={Design of a low-cost platform for autonomous mobile service robots},booktitle={IJCAI-16 Workshop on Autonomous Mobile Service Robots},month=jul,bib2html_dl_slides={papers/Eaton2016Design-slides.pdf},bib2html_dl_poster={papers/Eaton2016Design-poster.pdf}}
