Typical robot development requires that hardware be mostly functional before significant software development begins. Utilizing virtual prototype of hardware and its environment can reduce development time and manufacturing cost. Virtual prototyping is, however, a highly challenging task requiring in-depth knowledge in many disciplines. Few of simulation tools developed to alleviate this difficulty fully manage the complexity caused by the fact that developer must design and manage form (physical shape), function, and behavior altogether incrementally. Also, such simulation tools often do not support co-development of the target software and its test environment from requirements analysis to implementation. In this paper, we present our experience of developing a virtual prototype of Samsung Home Robot (SHR) with Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) using ASADAL/OBJ. Virtual prototyping in ASADAL/OBJ enables incremental co-development of both target system and its test environment in an object-oriented way. Furthermore ASADAL/OBJ facilitates concurrent development of form, behavior, and function. These features increase productivity as well as confidence through incremental refinement and validation. We give a brief background on the ASADAL/OBJ framework, then illuminate our experience of developing a virtual prototype of SHR.

Home service robots have received much attention from both academia and industry because home service robots have wide range of potential applications such as home security, cleaning, etc. The robots need to add or update services frequently according to the changing needs of human users. Furthermore, reactive nature of the robots add complexity to develop robot applications. These challenges raise safety issues seriously. Considering that safe operation of home service robots is crucial, current practice of validating robot applications is, however, not mature enough for wide deployment of home service robots. In this paper, we present our experience of developing and formally verifying discrete control software of Samsung Home Robot (SHR) using Esterel. We give a brief background on Esterel, then illuminate our result in formally verifying stopping behavior of SHR. Through the verification, we could detect and solve a feature interaction problem which caused the robot not to stop when a user commanded the robot to stop.

An effective human-robot interaction is essential for wide penetration of mobile home robots into the market. The ability to track human in the home environment is one of fundamental functions of home robots. In this paper, we introduce a prototype of Samsung home robot (SHR) developed by Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) and present a scheme of tracking user movement utilizing a structured light range sensor. The structured light range sensor is considered to be cost-effective and robust for a wide range of environment; however, its low resolution of range data tends to extract wrong features for the human tracking, such as table legs, trash cans, door-edges, etc. To compromise this weakness, we have developed an algorithm that excludes those features that do not come from human legs. Efficacy and robustness of this proposed system were examined through experiments in the real home environment.