Sobi: An Interactive Social Service Robot for Long-Term Autonomy in Open Environments
This addresses the problem of maintaining robot functionality in dynamic public spaces for service applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing robotics platforms and monitoring systems.
The authors tackled long-term autonomy for service robots in open environments by developing Sobi, a mobile robot that patrolled 66.6 km over 16 days with an average of 5.5 hours of travel per weekday and included a user interface evaluated with 12 participants.
Long-term autonomy in service robotics is a current research topic, especially for dynamic, large-scale environments that change over time. We present Sobi, a mobile service robot developed as an interactive guide for open environments, such as public places with indoor and outdoor areas. The robot will serve as a platform for environmental modeling and human-robot interaction. Its main hardware and software components, which we freely license as a documented open source project, are presented. Another key focus is Sobi's monitoring system for long-term autonomy, which restores system components in a targeted manner in order to extend the total system lifetime without unplanned intervention. We demonstrate first results of the long-term autonomous capabilities in a 16-day indoor deployment, in which the robot patrols a total of 66.6 km with an average of 5.5 hours of travel time per weekday, charging autonomously in between. In a user study with 12 participants, we evaluate the appearance and usability of the user interface, which allows users to interactively query information about the environment and directions.