The investigators will construct a robotic platform that combines mobility and dexterous manipulation capabilities with advanced sensing. This platform will serve as the experimental testbed for an integrated research effort into algorithms for programming mobile manipulators to perform complex tasks in human environment. The infrastructure will support research on five projects. (i) Probabilistic logic planning to develop plans using a representation of the world. This research will develop adaptive strategies to deal with uncertainty in the real world. (ii) Sensing for mobile manipulators deals with the challenge of coordinating the motions of the manipulator and the mobility operations that permit moving about the world. (iii) Sensing for mobile manipulators will explore how to move sensors such as cameras to get multiple views of a scene and improve understanding of the scene. (iv) Programming by demonstration will develop techniques to learn from human operators how to perform a complex task. (v) Programming by observation uses a hidden Markov model to deal with hierarchical task decomposition. Broader impacts of this project include the use of the facility in student thesis projects, REU projects that recruit from nearby women's colleges, and participation in the SPUR program that provides summer research opportunities to students from underrepresented groups.
