Nick Walker

Nick Walker, Yuqian Jiang, Maya Cakmak et al.

General-purpose service robots are expected to undertake a broad range of tasks at the request of users. Knowledge representation and planning systems are essential to flexible autonomous robots, but the field lacks a unified perspective on which features are essential for general-purpose service robots. Progress towards planning and reasoning for general-purpose service robots is hindered by differing assumptions about users, the environment, and the overall robot system. In this position paper, we propose desiderata for planning and reasoning systems to promote general-purpose service robots. Each proposed item draws on our experience with research on service robots in the office and home and on the demands of these environments. Our desiderata emphasize support for natural human-interfaces as well as for robust fallback methods when interactions with humans and the environment fail. We highlight relevant work towards these goals.

Yuqian Jiang, Nick Walker, Minkyu Kim et al.

When developing general purpose robots, the overarching software architecture can greatly affect the ease of accomplishing various tasks. Initial efforts to create unified robot systems in the 1990s led to hybrid architectures, emphasizing a hierarchy in which deliberative plans direct the use of reactive skills. However, since that time there has been significant progress in the low-level skills available to robots, including manipulation and perception, making it newly feasible to accomplish many more tasks in real-world domains. There is thus renewed optimism that robots will be able to perform a wide array of tasks while maintaining responsiveness to human operators. However, the top layer in traditional hybrid architectures, designed to achieve long-term goals, can make it difficult to react quickly to human interactions during goal-driven execution. To mitigate this difficulty, we propose a novel architecture that supports such transitions by adding a top-level reactive module which has flexible access to both reactive skills and a deliberative control module. To validate this architecture, we present a case study of its application on a domestic service robot platform.

Justin Hart, Harel Yedidsion, Yuqian Jiang et al.

Efforts are underway at UT Austin to build autonomous robot systems that address the challenges of long-term deployments in office environments and of the more prescribed domestic service tasks of the RoboCup@Home competition. We discuss the contrasts and synergies of these efforts, highlighting how our work to build a RoboCup@Home Domestic Standard Platform League entry led us to identify an integrated software architecture that could support both projects. Further, naturalistic deployments of our office robot platform as part of the Building-Wide Intelligence project have led us to identify and research new problems in a traditional laboratory setting.