Amelia

Amelia was built by Real World Interface (RWI) using Xavier-a mobile robot platform developed at CMU on a B24 base from RWI-as a prototype. Amelia has substantial engineering improvements over Xavier. Amelia is built on a B21 base. It has a top speed of 32 inches per second, while improved integral dead-reckoning insures extremely accurate drive and position controls. The battery life is six hours, and are hot-swappable. Two Pentium-100s are the main CPU’s on board with special shock-mounted hard drives. A 75Mhz 486 laptop acts as onboard console. All these are interconnected by an internal 10M Ethernet, and to the world via a 2MBs Wavelan wireless system. Sonar and infrared sensor arrays ring the robot, mounted on Smart Panels for quick and easy access to internal components. These Smart Panels also contain bump sensors. A Sony color camera is mounted on a Directed Perception pan/tilt head for visual sensing. Finally, an arm can extend for 4-degree of freedom manipulation of Amelia’s world. Like Xavier, Amelia has a distributed, concurrent software system, which runs under the Linux operating system. All programming is done in C, and processes communicate and are sequenced and synchronized viathe TASK CONTROL ARCHITECTURE (TCA) (Simmons 1995). Communication with Amelia is graphical (via the laptop), remote (via zephyr), and speech-driven. An off-board Next computer runs the SPHINX real-time, speaker-independent speech recognition system and a text-to-speech board provides speech generation. Thus, we can give verbal commands to the robot and the robot can respond verbally to indicate its status. In addition, a graphical user interface is available for giving commands and monitoring the robot’s status. Amelia plans to participate in the “Call a meeting” event. She will use the ROGUE system (Haigh & Veloso 1996) for high-level task planning through PRODIGY, a planning and learning system (Veloso et al. 1995). ROGUE is able to create a branching plan based on the observations of the real world, select appropriate orderings of goal locations, and monitor the robot’s progress