This paper presents a complete system for scheduling transportation orders to a fleet of autonomous mobile robots in service environments. It consists of the autonomous mobile robots, a user friendly interface to acquire the orders for the robots via internet and to store them in a database, a general language for modeling multistorey buildings with XML and the scheduling algorithms. The model ...

Recent developments in sensor technology have made it feasible to use mobile robots in several fields, but robots still lack the ability to accurately sense the environment. A major challenge to the widespread deployment of mobile robots is the ability to function autonomously, learning useful models of environmental features, recognizing environmental changes, and adapting the learned models i...

In this chapter, we will address two senses of the term “mobile robot navigation:” (1) finding a position or a course; and (2) travelling from place to place. In simplistic language, these two meanings correspond to answers to the questions “Where am I?’ and “How do I get there?’ Although the robotics community has devoted significant effort to unattended air and water vehicles, in this chapter...

We present our CoBot mobile service robots, which we aim at being a truly functional contribution to humans in our office environments. The robots perform tasks for humans, proactively assess and ask for the need of human help, and enable human remote presence through mobile telepresence. We introduce and present how we address these multiple roles that humans play with respect to autonomous mo...

Abstract: This paper concerns a service in which multiple guide robots in an area display arrows to guide individual users to their destinations. It proposes a method of identifying malfunctioning robots and robots that give wrong directions to users. In this method, users’ mobile terminals and robots form a store-carry and forward-type M2M communication network, and a distributed cooperative p...

A robot system consists of autonomous mobile robots each of which repeats LookCompute-Move cycles, where the robot observes the positions of other robots (Look phase), computes the track to the next location (Compute phase), and moves along the track (Move phase). In this survey, we focus on self-organization of mobile robots, especially their power of forming patterns. The formation power of a...

A stationary robot in an assembly line expects to execute all its hard-coded movements without any collision. Its recognition is limited to its tasks and the corresponding area of operation. In case of a failure an alarm is given and it stops working until a human being corrects the fault. The assembly robot does not react independently, which is the exact opposite to autonomous mobile robots. ...

Regarding mobile robots, navigation using fiducial markers has already been achieved and obstacle avoidance using search algorithms is common. However, the combination of these two ideas is relatively uncommon, and therefore, is the focus of this study. Owing to the mobility of these robots, good performance of the system is of utmost importance. Furthermore, since odometers on mobile robots ar...

This paper presents the objectives of the project, as currently executed in the Industrial Research Institute for Automation and Measurements PIAP, which is focused on examining the mobile robots influence on the people’s collective behaviour. The main objective is to identify and interpret the factors, which can drive or impede the common mobile robots application in a busy human environment. ...

Localization of mobile robots are important tasks for developing autonomous mobile robots. This paper proposes a method to estimate positions of a mobile robot using a omnidirectional camera on the robot. Landmarks for points of references are set up on a field where the robot works. The omnidirectional camera which can obtain 360 [deg] around images takes photographs of these landmarks. The po...