Autonomous Mobile Service Robots For Humans, With Human Help, and Enabling Human Remote Presence

We present our CoBot mobile service robots, which we aim at being a truly functional contribution to humans in our office environments. The robots perform tasks for humans, proactively assess and ask for the need of human help, and enable human remote presence through mobile telepresence. We introduce and present how we address these multiple roles that humans play with respect to autonomous mobile service robots. We first briefly introduce the CoBot robots, which include robust autonomous localization and navigation. We then focus on presenting how users can request tasks and interact with CoBot, how CoBot reasons about humans that may help it, and how humans can be mobile telepresent on CoBot. CoBot has been reliably and increasingly effectively functioning in our environments for the last two years. We estimate it has autonomously navigated for our task-based tests, in two different buildings, altogether for more than 50km.