Research
Research Topics
- Mobile robot navigation and planning.
- Supervision, detection, diagnosis and exception recovery in autonomous mobile robots.
- Planning under uncertainty using Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP).
- Inter-process communication facilities for visualizing the execution of concurrent systems
Main Projects
RIDE (Robotics Integrated Development Environment)
A multi mobile robot control platform that uses IPC to communicate on-board modules and JIPC to exchange information between different robots. This environment includes:
- RoboGraph. Mobile robot graphic programming environment based on Petri nets that include tools for debugging and monitoring
- RoboCAN. CAN based communication system that connects the sensors and actuators in a mobile robot to the control unit
WatchBot
A surveillance system that includes mobile robots.
In the last few years, the amount of money spent on security has grown due to a number of factors. The surveillance system of buildings has particularly become an important issue to human daily life. The goal of this project is to develop a Multirobot system for building surveillance applications monitored through Internet. Each robot can handle some daily surveillance routine tasks. Sensor information such as real-time images captured by a camera on the robot with pan/tilt/zoom functions can be transmitted back to the central management office via a local area network. Teleoperation of the robots via the Internet or intranet is also possible. The complete system can be installed and reprogrammed in a very short time thanks to a high level task application programming environment named RoboGraph. Using this tool the application can be programmed using Petri nets with commands and events previously defined
BellBot
A mobile robot application for different office tasks.
The purpose of this project is the development of an automatic bellboy system based on a series of moving platforms that interact with customers and service personnel to execute different tasks in hotel environments. The development is being carried out in two complementary areas: mobile robots and social robots, which justifies collaboration of two research groups (University of Vigo y el Technology Center Cartif). In the mobile robotics field, this project helps to improve the robotics development environment RIDE (Integrated Development Environment for Robotics) that has been already used in other projects. One of the objectives of the current project is to generalize the development environment, which has already been applied successfully in the creation of monitoring applications, and thus extend its operation to allow the creation of any Web application based on mobile robots.
ShowBot
A mobile robot application to guide people in different events.
The tour guide robot application participated in the "Xunventude Galicia Net" for the 2007 and 2008 editions with different robots. In the 2007 edition, a Peoplebot base worked for three days in the "Palacio de Congresos y Exposiciones de Galicia", Santiago de Compostela (Spain). In the 2008 edition, a B21 base with a robotic head was used. Even though two different platforms have been used, most of the modules for the 2007 edition were also used in 2008. The main changes in the basic modules were that the base control module was changed and the head control was added. In the Task definition level, a few Petri nets were created to include the new primitives. For example, the robotic head moves the mouth, while the speech module was reproducing a text. Finally, a few configuration project parameters, such as the places to visit and the texts to say, were changed.