Robots on self-organizing knowledge networks

Abstract

In this work, we propose a new framework for better deployment and utilization of robots in our uncertain, unstructured everyday environments. Programming robots can be a very time-consuming process and seems almost impossible for ordinary end users. To cope with many challenges in the user programming, this work is to provide an open environment for building robot programming automatically, where we have robots learn how to accomplish commanded tasks interacting with the object. An integrated sensing and computing tag is embedded into every single object in the environment. In the robot controller, only the basic software libraries for low-level robot motion control are provided by the robot manufacturer. The main contributions of this work is to develop the knowledge integrator platform that we call Omniscient Organizer that generates the application programs and send them to the robot controller through networks. In the Omniscient Organizer, the object-related information downloaded from the object Web server merges into robot control software based on the task commands from the human. We have built a test bed and demonstrated that a robot can perform common household tasks such as clearing the table within the proposed framework.