Interaction and Autonomy in RoboCup@Home and Building-Wide Intelligence
This work addresses the problem of creating versatile autonomous robots for domestic and office environments, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing efforts without claiming major breakthroughs.
The researchers tackled the challenge of developing autonomous robot systems for both RoboCup@Home competitions and long-term office deployments, resulting in an integrated software architecture that supports both projects and identifying new research problems from real-world deployments.
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.