Abstract
While many researchers have built service robot prototypes that work perfectly under close human supervision, deploying an autonomous robot in an open environment for a long time is not always trivial. This paper presents our experience with TritonBot, a long-term autonomous receptionist and tour guide robot. We deployed TritonBot as an example to study reliability challenges in long-term autonomous service robots. During the past two years, we regularly did maintenance, fixed issues, and rolled out new features. In the process, we identified reliability engineering challenges in three aspects of long-term autonomy: scalability, resilience, and learning; we also formulated techniques to confront these challenges. Our experience shows that proper engineering practices and design principles reduce manual interventions and increase general reliability in long-term autonomous service robot deployments.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Amos, B., Ludwiczuk, B., Satyanarayanan, M.: Openface: a general-purpose face recognition library with mobile applications. Tech. rep., CMU-CS-16-118, CMU School of Computer Science (2016)
Beyer, B., Jones, C., Petoff, J., Murphy, N.: Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems. O’Reilly Media, Incorporated (2016)
Birolini, A.: Reliability Engineering, vol. 5. Springer (2007)
Burgard, W., Cremers, A.B., Fox, D., Hähnel, D., Lakemeyer, G., Schulz, D., Steiner, W., Thrun, S.: The interactive museum tour-guide robot. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth National/Tenth Conference on Artificial Intelligence/Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI ’98/IAAI ’98, pp. 11–18. American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, CA, USA (1998)
Burns, B., Grant, B., Oppenheimer, D., Brewer, E., Wilkes, J.: Borg, omega, and kubernetes. Commun. ACM 59(5), 50–57 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1145/2890784
Carlson, J., Murphy, R.R.: Reliability analysis of mobile robots. In: 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No. 03CH37422), vol. 1, pp. 274–281 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1109/ROBOT.2003.1241608
Chung, M.J.Y., Huang, J., Takayama, L., Lau, T., Cakmak, M.: Iterative design of a system for programming socially interactive service robots. In: Agah, A., Cabibihan, J.J., Howard, A.M., Salichs, M.A., He, H. (eds.) Social Robotics, pp. 919–929. Springer International Publishing (2016)
Docker Inc.: Docker is an open platform to build, ship and run distributed applications anywhere (2018). https://www.docker.com
Google LLC: Cloud speech API—speech to text conversion powered by machine learning (2017). URL https://cloud.google.com/speech
Google LLC: gRPC: A high performance, open-source universal RPC framework (2018). https://grpc.io/
Google LLC: Protocol buffers are a language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanism for serializing structured data (2018). https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/
Hawes, N., Burbridge, C., Jovan, F., Kunze, L., Lacerda, B., Mudrova, L., Young, J., Wyatt, J., Hebesberger, D., Kortner, T., Ambrus, R., Bore, N., Folkesson, J., Jensfelt, P., Beyer, L., Hermans, A., Leibe, B., Aldoma, A., Faulhammer, T., Zillich, M., Vincze, M., Chinellato, E., Al-Omari, M., Duckworth, P., Gatsoulis, Y., Hogg, D.C., Cohn, A.G., Dondrup, C., Fentanes, J.P., Krajnik, T., Santos, J.M., Duckett, T., Hanheide, M.: The strands project: long-term autonomy in everyday environments. IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag. 24(3), 146–156 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2016.2636359
Hess, W., Kohler, D., Rapp, H., Andor, D.: Real-time loop closure in 2d lidar slam. In: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 1271–1278 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487258
Khandelwal, P., Zhang, S., Sinapov, J., Leonetti, M., Thomason, J., Yang, F., Gori, I., Svetlik, M., Khante, P., Lifschitz, V., K. Aggarwal, J., Mooney, R., Stone, P.: Bwibots: A platform for bridging the gap between ai and human-robot interaction research. Int. J. Robot. Res. 36, 635–659 (2017)
Kirby, R., Forlizzi, J., Simmons, R.: Affective social robots. In: Robotics and Autonomous Systems, vol. 58. Pittsburgh, PA (2010)
Leigh, A., Pineau, J., Olmedo, N., Zhang, H.: Person tracking and following with 2d laser scanners. In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 726–733 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2015.7139259
Marder-Eppstein, E., Berger, E., Foote, T., Gerkey, B., Konolige, K.: The office marathon: robust navigation in an indoor office environment. In: 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 300–307 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1109/ROBOT.2010.5509725
O’Connor, P., Kleyner, A.: Practical Reliability Engineering. Wiley (2012)
Pahl, C., Lee, B.: Containers and clusters for edge cloud architectures—a technology review. In: 2015 3rd International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud, pp. 379–386. IEEE (2015)
Quigley, M., Conley, K., Gerkey, B., Faust, J., Foote, T., Leibs, J., Wheeler, R., Ng, A.Y.: Ros: an open-source robot operating system. In: ICRA Workshop on Open Source Software, vol. 3, p. 5. Kobe (2009)
Rosenthal, S., Veloso, M.M.: Mixed-initiative long-term interactions with an all-day-companion robot. In: AAAI Fall Symposium: Dialog with Robots, vol. 10, p. 05 (2010)
The Regents of the University of California: gRPC: Catkinized GRPC package (2019). https://github.com/CogRob/catkin_grpc
Thrun, S., Bennewitz, M., Burgard, W., Cremers, A.B., Dellaert, F., Fox, D., Hahnel, D., Rosenberg, C., Roy, N., Schulte, J., Schulz, D.: Minerva: a second-generation museum tour-guide robot. In: Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No. 99CH36288C), vol. 3, pp. 1999–2005 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1109/ROBOT.1999.770401
Wang, S., Christensen, H.I.: Tritonbot: First lessons learned from deployment of a long-term autonomy tour guide robot. In: Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pp. 158–165 (2018)
Wang, S., Liu, X., Zhao, J., Christensen, H.I.: Rorg: Service robot software management with linux containers. In: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE (2019)
Wise, M., Ferguson, M., King, D., Diehr, E., Dymesich, D.: Fetch & freight: standard platforms for service robot applications. In: Workshop on Autonomous Mobile Service Robots, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this paper
Cite this paper
Wang, S., Liu, X., Zhao, J., Christensen, H.I. (2021). Robotic Reliability Engineering: Experience from Long-Term TritonBot Development. In: Ishigami, G., Yoshida, K. (eds) Field and Service Robotics. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 16. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9460-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9460-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-15-9459-5
Online ISBN: 978-981-15-9460-1
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)