Toward Campus Mail Delivery Using BDI

TL;DR

This paper presents the development of a real-world BDI-based autonomous campus mail delivery robot that integrates ROS with a BDI reasoning system for high-level decision making.

Contribution

It demonstrates the integration of ROS with a BDI reasoning system for practical campus mail delivery in tunnel environments.

Findings

Successfully linked ROS with BDI reasoning for real-world navigation

Implemented perception-action loop for tunnel mail delivery

Achieved hardware-software integration for autonomous operation

Abstract

Autonomous systems developed with the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture are usually mostly implemented in simulated environments. In this project we sought to build a BDI agent for use in the real world for campus mail delivery in the tunnel system at Carleton University. Ideally, the robot should receive a delivery order via a mobile application, pick up the mail at a station, navigate the tunnels to the destination station, and notify the recipient. We linked the Robot Operating System (ROS) with a BDI reasoning system to achieve a subset of the required use cases. ROS handles the low-level sensing and actuation, while the BDI reasoning system handles the high-level reasoning and decision making. Sensory data is orchestrated and sent from ROS to the reasoning system as perceptions. These perceptions are then deliberated upon, and an action string is sent back to ROS for interpretation and driving of the necessary actuator for the action to be performed. In this paper we present our current implementation, which closes the loop on the hardware-software integration, and implements a subset of the use cases required for the full system.