Editorial: Special Issue on Field and Service Robotics

This special issue contains representative works from the Second International Conference on Field and Service Robotics that was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 29-31, 1999. This conference convened researchers and end-users to discuss issues facing the transition of field and service robotics from laboratory to daily use. These papers emphasize both contributions at the component level as well as system performance in target applications. A requirement for paper selection was demonstrated field results. We believe that the papers in this special issue represent the state of the art in field and service robotics. S. Thrun et al.’s recent demonstrations of their museum tour guide robot has raised the bar on mobile robot performance in cluttered and dynamic environments. The key technology addressed is that of robot positioning using on-board range sensors. Their approach pushes the capabilities of probabilistic algorithms and demonstrates the results in a dynamic museum environment. D. Yoerger and his collaborators have collected impressive data from their underwater robot in an ongoing quest to map and understand subsea environments. One of the many critical challenges addressed in Yoerger’s work is image mosaicing when vehicle motion is not well known. Just like Thrun in the case of indoor mobile robotics, Yoerger sets the standard to which underwater robot performance will be compared. Back on terra firma, D. Apostolopoulos et al.’s Nomad robot operated under extremely harsh conditions during its search for meteorites in Antarctica. While contending with the standard challenges of positioning and navigation, they also consider probabilistic techniques for identifying meteorites. (False positives are appropriately termed meteorwrongs!) The Nomad robot demonstration in Antarctica is one step toward the ultimate goal of sending a mobile robot to the moon that can be supervised from earth. Infrastructure maintenance is a huge and growing market: Kirkham et al. developed the PIRAT in-pipe robot system for the purpose of sewer inspection with minimal invasion. Their approach to inspection is highly cost-effective and provides a high-resolution laser range image of the pipe that enables accurate condition assessment. Due to the difficulty of direct human interpretation of the huge amount of data, the authors have implemented an automated scheme to filter the data and detect problematic locations in the pipeline. Excellent results are described for several types of sewers. Another brand of robotics research is aimed at directly helping people in their daily lives. G. Lacey and S. MacNamara describe PAM-AID, a robotic smart walker to assist the elderly. Results from a series of nursing home tests indicate that this kind of aid can be accepted and can help aging and partially disabled people attain an improved quality of life. This special issue also addresses the state of the art in mobile robot component technologies for motion, vision, and positioning. Most mobile mechanisms are nonholonomic. For example, a differential drive robot is nonholonomic because it cannot control velocities perpendicular to its heading. The mobile mechanism that R. Holmberg and O. Khatib introduce does not have such a nonholonomic constraint and therefore allows for a richer set of motions that the robot can experience, which is especially useful in highly cluttered environments. Another key technology is D. Langer et al.’s three-dimensional scanning laser radar. This system is primarily intended for high-precision mapping applications and results are shown for a variety of applications including mapping of tunnels and manufacturing work cells. A unique dual frequency scheme enables extremely high resolution as well as long range, low noise, and low error returns for a wide range of target materials and surface conditions. Even when robots can see about themselves, they commonly require high speed means to measure position information. S. Sukkarieh et al. describe a low-cost, high-precision, strap down inertial unit that is designed with the specific goal of improving fault rejection and isolation. Another approach to vehicle positioning that relies on camera vision is described by A. Kelly. He has developed a practical, high-performance mobile robot localization technique that exploits the fact that many manmade environments are composed of substantially flat, visually textured surfaces. The mobile robot drives on these surfaces and, using vision and mosaicing approaches, can localize itself without using inertial, GPS, or other external positioning devices. Kelly demonstrates the technique in an industrial material handling setting. S. Hirose, perhaps more than any other robotics researcher, has shown that a mobile robot is more than a garbage-can-shaped autonomous device. Hirose’s mobile robots look like members of a “robot zoo” from your favorite science fiction movie. Some of his robots are legged, some are wheeled, and some are both! In the early 1970s, Hirose introduced a radical alternative to wheeled and legged mechanism with the first snake robot ever built. His paper in this journal puts forth a design methodology, termed variable constraint mechanism, that he has applied to a number of recent robots to extend their capability in widely varying terrain and conditions. We hope that you enjoy and benefit from this set of excellent papers as much as we have!