ViRbot: A system for the operation of mobile robots

Abstract

This paper describes a robotics architecture, the ViRbot, used to control the operation of service mobile robots. It accomplish the required commands using AI actions planning and reactive behaviors with a description of the working environment. In the ViRbot architecture the actions planner module uses Conceptual Dependency (CD) primitives as the base for representing the problem domain. After a command is spoken to the mobile robot a CD representation of it is generated, a rule based system takes this CD representation, and using the state of the environment generates other subtasks represented by CDs to accomplish the command. By using a good representation of the problem domain through CDs and a rule based system as an inference engine, the operation of the robot becomes a more tractable problem and easier to implement. The ViRbot system was tested in the Robocup@Home [1] category in the Robocup competition at Bremen, Germany in 2006 and in Atlanta in 2007, where our robot TPR8, obtained the third place in this category. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.