The STRANDS Project: Long-Term Autonomy in Everyday Environments

Thanks to the efforts of the robotics and autonomous systems community, robots are becoming ever more capable. There is also an increasing demand from end-users for autonomous service robots that can operate in real environments for extended periods. In the STRANDS project we are tackling this demand head-on by integrating state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and robotics research into mobile service robots, and deploying these systems for long-term installations in security and care environments. Over four deployments, our robots have been operational for a combined duration of 104 days autonomously performing end-user defined tasks, covering 116km in the process. In this article we describe the approach we have used to enable long-term autonomous operation in everyday environments, and how our robots are able to use their long run times to improve their own performance.

Object Modelling with a Handheld RGB-D Camera

This work presents a flexible system to reconstruct 3D models of objects captured with an RGB-D sensor. A major advantage of the method is that our reconstruction pipeline allows the user to acquire a full 3D model of the object. This is achieved by acquiring several partial 3D models in different sessions that are automatically merged together to reconstruct a full model. In addition, the 3D models acquired by our system can be directly used by state-of-the-art object instance recognition and object tracking modules, providing object-perception capabilities for different applications, such as human-object interaction analysis or robot grasping. The system does not impose constraints in the appearance of objects (textured, untextured) nor in the modelling setup (moving camera with static object or a turn-table setup). The proposed reconstruction system has been used to model a large number of objects resulting in metrically accurate and visually appealing 3D models.