Deploying Robots in Everyday Environments: Towards Dependable and Practical Robotic Systems

TL;DR

This paper discusses efforts to improve robot deployment in real-world environments by developing introspection, monitoring, and remote diagnostics to enhance reliability and usability of robotic systems.

Contribution

It introduces initial work on a robotic black box, system monitoring, and remote experimentation, advancing practical deployment of dependable robots.

Findings

Development of a robotic black box concept

Component and system monitoring strategies

Initial remote monitoring experiments

Abstract

Robot deployment in realistic dynamic environments is a challenging problem despite the fact that robots can be quite skilled at a large number of isolated tasks. One reason for this is that robots are rarely equipped with powerful introspection capabilities, which means that they cannot always deal with failures in a reasonable manner; in addition, manual diagnosis is often a tedious task that requires technicians to have a considerable set of robotics skills. In this paper, we discuss our ongoing efforts - in the context of the ROPOD project - to address some of these problems. In particular, we (i) present our early efforts at developing a robotic black box and consider some factors that complicate its design, (ii) explain our component and system monitoring concept, and (iii) describe the necessity for remote monitoring and experimentation as well as our initial attempts at performing those. Our preliminary work opens a range of promising directions for making robots more usable and reliable in practice - not only in the context of ROPOD, but in a more general sense as well.