Marvin

In the following some information about mobile robot Marvin (Mobile Autonomous Robotic Vehicle for Indoor Navigation) is listed. It serves as a research platform to set up a prototype of an autonomous service robot, which can carry out transport, security and entertainment tasks in office environment as well as in industrial and domestic surroundings. Other robots can be found at the research topics of the research group.

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While transport systems available on market are mainly based on planned or fixed routes, Marvin can react on dynamic changes of its surrounding through course changes, without user interaction or danger of collision exists. More important is its capability to autonomously explore unknown structured environments for map building. The extracted topological map serves as a base for transport tasks and facilitates an intuitive user interface (e.g. to target the destination positions). Due to the flexible structure of hardware and software future extensions can be easily integrated. For instance, in the smart factory scenario the robot could support service, maintenance and security personal through actual location-dependant information.

As industrial surroundings offer well-defined operating conditions performing service tasks in office or in domestic environments makes further research in the field of environmental modeling necessary, particularly, under the aspect of a continuously changing world. For example, to supply information about things of daily life, the exact knowledge of their location as that of the person who needs this information is necessary.

In the long run, such a system could be applied especially for taking care of elderly people living alone in their familiar environment as an endorsement to personal care. Exemplary tasks in this scenario comprise the control of taking medicine, searching and transportation of objects to the alarm of a medical emergency service. Although the growing demand in this field is obvious today still there exist no products on the market that can execute these types of complex tasks autonomously and dependably.

In order to meet these requirements in the future, new methods and techniques are developed at the Robotics Research Lab concerning obstacle avoidance, autonomous exploration of indoor environments (environmental modelling and mapping, finding objects of potential interest) as well as intuitive user control mechanisms. All these approaches are implemented and extensively tested on the robot Marvin.

The mechanical construction of Marvin has been developed at RRLab on the base of aluminium system profiles by Norcan. The sensor system currently consists of two laser scanners from SICK, an ultrasonic sensor belt, a camera and a stereo microphone system. Specially designed DSP based electronic units are used to connect sensors and motors to the controlling computer. The software for motion control and autonomous environment exploration is based on the methodology of behaviour based control in order to assure a robust, flexible and easily expandable structure.

User interaction is actually realized by a touch-display on the robot as well as synthesized voice output via two loud speakers. Besides that a connection to the controlling software from another PC, a PDA or a mobile telephone through WLAN or Bluetooth is possible.

• Jens Wettach
• Carsten Hillenbrand
• Tobias Luksch