Long-Term Autonomy in Everyday Environments: A New Challenge for AI and Robotics

3^rd May 2016, 13:00 Ashton Lecture Theater
Dr Nick Hawes
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT
United Kingdom

Abstract

The performance of autonomous robots, i.e. robots that can make their own decisions and choose their own actions, is becoming increasingly impressive, but most of them are still constrained to labs, or controlled environments. In addition to this, these robots are typically only able to do intelligent things for a short period of time, before either crashing (physically or digitally) or running out of things to do. In order to go beyond these limitations, and to deliver the kind of autonomous service robots required by society, we must conquer the challenge of combining artificial intelligence and robotics to develop systems capable of long-term autonomy in everyday environments. This talk will present an overview of research in this direction, focussing on the mobile robots for security and care domains developed by the EU-funded STRANDS project (http://strands-project.eu).