The Robot Household Marathon Experiment

TL;DR

This paper reports on a large-scale autonomous robot household experiment testing scalability and robustness in performing various manipulation tasks over extended periods, highlighting challenges, solutions, and limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive robotic system capable of autonomous household tasks and evaluates its performance in a long-term, scalable experiment.

Findings

Successful autonomous execution of household manipulation tasks

Insights into scalability and robustness challenges

Identification of limitations in current robotic systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present an experiment, designed to investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation. The experiment involves performing variations of mobile pick and place actions and opening/closing environment containers in a human household. The robot is expected to act completely autonomously for extended periods of time. We discuss the scientific challenges raised by the experiment as well as present our robotic system that can address these challenges and successfully perform all the tasks of the experiment. We present empirical results and the lessons learned as well as discuss where we hit limitations.