Taking over arbitrary tasks like humans do with a mobile service robot in open-world settings requires a holistic scene perception for decision-making and high-level control. This article presents a human-inspired scene perception model to minimize the gap between human and robotic capabilities. The approach takes over fundamental neuroscience concepts, such as a triplet perception split into recognition, knowledge representation, and knowledge interpretation. A recognition system splits the background and foreground to integrate exchangeable image-based object detectors and simultaneous localization and mapping, a multilayer knowledge base represents scene information in a hierarchical structure and offers interfaces for high-level control, and knowledge interpretation methods deploy spatio-temporal scene analysis and perceptual learning for self-adjustment. A single-setting ablation study is used to evaluate the impact of each component on the overall performance for a fetch-and-carry scenario in two simulated and one real-world environment.

This study presents key technologies of a mobile service robot developed to manipulate objects around people safely. We demonstrate this ability to support staff in elderly care homes in the future. The take-over by a service robot allows the staff to spend less time with routine logistical tasks and therefore better focus on the interaction with residents. In the selected application scenario, the robot helps staff by (1) retrieving empty bottles from the residents' rooms, (2) bringing them to the kitchen, (3) taking the refilled bottles back to a table inside the residents' rooms. This task seems trivial for a person, but the robot needs to orchestrate numerous algorithms and components to work smoothly, such as bottle pose detection, manipulation, and navigation. A technical evaluation indicates a high performance of single components, but due to isolated failures, the overall scenario does not always succeed. Next to the technical aspects, it is fundamental to determine the acceptance of the robot, which was achieved by analyzing questionnaires given to care workers. Finally, this paper presents lessons learned to help other researchers in similar use-cases.

Field studies where robots are tested in real life settings bring different challenges for researchers, robotics scientists and users. In this paper, we address some of the challenges we encountered when testing two different drink-serving service robots in the wild. We collect challenges from three different experiments. Two experiments were conducted in elderly care facilities, while a third experiment took place in the lobby of a concert hall. We focus on the challenges that researchers face during the preparation phase and the on-set deployment phase when testing robots in the wild. We point to potential difficulties that may arise and present some practical solutions to the issues encountered. Our results suggest that lab studies do not sufficiently prepare the researcher for research 'in the wild'.

One way to allow elderly people to stay longer in their homes is to use of service robots to support them with everyday tasks. Having this goal in mind, we design, develop, and evaluate a low-cost mobile robot to communicate with elderly people. The main idea is to create an affordable communication assistant robot which is optimized for multimodal Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Our robot can navigate autonomously through dynamic environments using a new algorithm to calculate poses for approaching persons. The robot was tested in a real-life scenario in a residential care home for the elderly.

SRS is a European research project for building robust personal assistant robots using ROS (Robotic Operating System) and Care-O-bot (COB) 3 as the initial demonstration platform. In this paper, experience gained while building the SRS system is presented. A main contribution of the paper is the SRS autonomous control framework. The framework is divided into two parts. First, it has an automatic task planner, which initialises actions on the symbolic level. The planner produces proactive robotic behaviours based on updated semantic knowledge. Second, it has an action executive for coordination actions at the level of sensing and actuation. The executive produces reactive behaviours in well-defined domains. The two parts are integrated by fuzzy logic based symbolic grounding. As a whole, they represent the framework for autonomous control. Based on the framework, several new components and user interfaces are integrated on top of COB's existing capabilities to enable robust fetch and carry in unstructured environments. The implementation strategy and results are discussed at the end of the paper.

In this article, we describe the development of a human-robot interaction concept for service robots to assist elderly people in the home with physical tasks. Our approach is based on the insight that robots are not yet able to handle all tasks autonomously with sufficient reliability in the complex and heterogeneous environments of private homes. We therefore employ remote human operators to assist on tasks a robot cannot handle completely autonomously. Our development methodology was user-centric and iterative, with six user studies carried out at various stages involving a total of 241 participants. The concept is under implementation on the Care-O-bot 3 robotic platform. The main contributions of this article are (1) the results of a survey in form of a ranking of the demands of elderly people and informal caregivers for a range of 25 robot services, (2) the results of an ethnography investigating the suitability of emergency teleassistance and telemedical centers for incorporating robotic teleassistance, and (3) a user-validated human-robot interaction concept with three user roles and corresponding three user interfaces designed as a solution to the problem of engineering reliable service robots for home environments.

This paper analyzes the potential to apply mobile service robots in offshore oil and gas producing environments. The required hardware and software components and abilities of such a mobile offshore inspection and manipulation robot are presented in this paper. Possible applications of mobile service robots in an offshore environment range from simple visual inspection tasks to physical intervention with the process equipment, e.g. for sample taking, valve turning, cleaning up minor obstructions, and operating control panels. The first prototype of a mobile offshore inspection robot is equipped with a robotic arm which carries a camera for visual inspection as well as various application sensors such as a microphone, gas and fire sensors. It is able of both, remote and autonomous inspection of industrial process equipment. In automatic mode the robot autonomously executes pre-programmed inspection tasks. The results of all inspection tasks are saved to a database and can be reviewed by the responsible operator in the central control room at any time. The evaluation of the first autonomous mobile robot that has ever been operated in offshore environments has proven the applicability of mobile robotics to offshore environments. Different types of inspection tasks (visual and acoustic inspection, gas measuring) have been programmed to and executed by the robot successfully without ever jeopardizing the safety of the platform or the platform personnel. The application of mobile robotics in offshore environments can reduce the level of manual human intervention required to operate a production facility thereby increasing the efficiency of the workforce, improving safety and working conditions, and improving the production economics. The successful evaluation of the first realization of a mobile inspection and manipulation robot has thus leveled the ground for future mobile robot installations in offshore environments.