Indoor Mobile Robotics at Grima, PUC

This paper describes the main activities and achievements of our research group on Machine Intelligence and Robotics (Grima) at the Computer Science Department, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC). Since 2002, we have been developing an active research in the area of indoor autonomous social robots. Our main focus has been the cognitive side of Robotics, where we have developed algorithms for autonomous navigation using wheeled robots, scene recognition using vision and 3D range sensors, and social behaviors using Markov Decision Processes, among others. As a distinguishing feature, in our research we have followed a probabilistic approach, deeply rooted in machine learning and Bayesian statistical techniques. Among our main achievements are an increasing list of publications in main Robotics conference and journals, and the consolidation of a research group with more than 25 people among full-time professors, visiting researchers, and graduate students.