Mission Planning for a Mobile Service Robot

In office and domestic environments there are several different tasks that are considered as boring or time-consuming, which would preferably be carried out by an autonomous mobile service robot. One of the primary tasks for a mobile service robot is to perform fetch-and-carry missions. For a robot to be able to perform a mission, the mission first must be planned, which is done by a mission planner system. In this thesis the development of an improved mission planner system is described, to be used in an existing robot system. The development includes also a human-robot interface and a mission executer. The tasks for the human-robot interface are to interpret a command sentence, perform a validity check of user commands and to resolve ambiguous commands by entering a dialogue with the user. The mission planner, of concern in this thesis, is a navigation planner capable of performing on-line planning in an office or domestic environment, using a hierarchical topologic map representation. The mission executer has the capability to handle errors during mission execution, e.g. if a passage is blocked the mission is replanned to find an alternative path. Each problem area is introduced and earlier work is presented as a basis for a design. The developed system was tested and evaluated, and presented results include working functionality, experimental runtime evaluations of algorithms and identifications of limitations and other issues open for future work. Uppgiftsplanering för en mobil servicerobot Examensarbete