Safety, uncertainty, and real-time problems in developing autonomous robots

  • Authors:
  • Vitaliy Rybak

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Postgraduate Studies, Tecnological University of the Mixteca, Oaxaca, Mexico

  • Venue:
  • ISPRA'09 Proceedings of the 8th WSEAS international conference on Signal processing, robotics and automation
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Recent developments in robotics outside traditional industrial applications increasingly focus on operation of robots in an unstructured environment and human vs. robot interactions. Examples of new applications of robots in unstructured environments that are actively pursued today are personal and service robotics, space and underwater robotics, medical and rehabilitation robotics, construction robotics, and agriculture robotics. The new trends in robotics research have a general goal of getting robots closer to human social needs. In this case a key problem of robotics is the problem of safety of robot and its surrounding. For safe autonomous functioning in a dynamic unstructured environment, a robot should possess a capability of real-time data processing under information uncertainty. These three issues - safety, uncertainty, and real-time data processing are closely related: planning safe actions based on uncertain data usually requires more computation than planning without uncertainty because multiple possible outcomes of actions should be considered. The main sources of the uncertainty are inaccuracy of sensorial data measurement, time-delay of sensorial data acquisition and processing, and time-delayed feedback in a robot's control system. As increase of accuracy of measurements and speed of data processing has technical and economic restrictions, there is a necessity for search of practical decisions in the conditions of existing possibilities. We propose a method of real-time data processing under information uncertainty that deals collaborative processing of various data, visual and non-visual. Finally we present the examples of application of the proposed method for building of robot's environment model and for robot motion planning with obstacles avoiding.