PRIAMOS: An Advanced Moblie System for Service, Inspection, and Surveillance Tasks

Opening new application areas for mobile robots requires to design systems that are robust, safe, and adaptive with respect to the environment they are operating in. Such systems must be smart enough to communicate with inexperienced users. They must therefore be easily programmable and understandable. This article describes PRIAMOS, an autonomous mobile robot equipped with a highly sophisticated sensor system which enables it to operate autonomously in a real ooce environment. Since the basis for eecient robot operation is a reliable model of the real world, particular interest is devoted to the PRIAMOS sensor system and the methods used to maintain the robot's world knowledge. A changing world requires changing strategies for problem solving. Approaches to the adaptation of PRIAMOS' task-related knowledge, i.e., to learning situation-action rules from experience, are presented. In that context, programming by demonstration and models of concept formation are considered to establish a meaningful communication link to a human user.