ESPRIT II Project 2043 'MARIE':

Mobile Autonomous Robot in an Industrial Environment

The objective of this project is to develop integrated hardware and software systems to give autonomy to a class of robot vehicles and manipulators in an environment, parts of which can change dynamically.

A key issue within the project is the development and testing of an information framework called the Perception and Control Model. Based on this model, the decision system uses a combination of symbolic and numeric techniques, thus combining the strong points of both control engineering and artificial intelligence approaches. The combination of the two approaches will be demonstrated in two distinct testbeds. The first emphasises path-finding and coarse manoeuvring capabilities in a robot vehicle, the second highlights coarse and fine manoeuvres as well as flexible mission planning, as required in a diagnostic data acquisition task.

The integration of symbolic and numeric models will enable these systems to meet the major requirements of the control system:

• understanding a complex environment
• manoeuvring in non-exceptional situations
• supervising tasks, and decision making in unpredicted or degraded situations.

Researchers:

Cooperations:

Publications/links:

• Project 'Connected Smart Tasks'
  Making an interface around the MARIE tasks, where they sell their capabilities.
• Marie Experimentation Platform Project Page.
• On-line plan-generation for the MARIE-robot
• A. Visser, G.D. van Albada and L.O. Hertzberger, "Data and event handling for the MARIE vehicle", in J.I. Soliman and D. Roller, editors, 28th International Symposium on Automative Technology and Automation ISATA, Proceedings of the dedicated conference on robotics, motion and machine vision in the automotive industries, pages 403-410, (Automative Automation Limited, Croydon, England), Sep. 1995. (Portable Document Format 28 Kb)
• (Compressed Postscript)
• G.A. den Boer; G.D. van Albada; L.O. Hertzberger; G.R. Meijer; J.-B. Thevenon; P. LePage; E.J. Gaussens and F. Arlabosse: An exception handling model applied to autonomous mobile robots, in F.C.A. Groen; S. Hirose and C.E. Thorpe, editors, Intelligent Autonomous Systems - IAS 3, pp. 297-306. IOS Press, Washington, Oxford, Amsterdam, Tokyo, 1993.
• L.O. Hertzberger; G.D. van Albada and G.A. den Boer: Information Archicture Concepts for Autonomous Control, in U. Rembold; R. Dillman; L.O. Hertzberger and T. Kanade, editors, Intelligent Autonomous Systems - IAS-4, (Also as Technical report CS-94-20) pp. 190-197. IOS Press, Amsterdam, Oxford, Washington DC, March 1995. (Compressed Postscript)
• G.A. den Boer; G.D. van Albada; L.O. Hertzberger; C. Koburg and M. Mergel: The MARIE autonomous mobile robot, in F.C.A. Groen; S. Hirose and C.E. Thorpe, editors, Intelligent Autonomous Systems - IAS 3, pp. 164-173. IOS Press, Washington, Oxford, Amsterdam, Tokyo, 1993. (Compressed Postscript)
• G.D. van Albada; J.M. Lagerberg and B.J.A. Kröse: Software architecture and simulation tools for autonomous mobile robots, in S.G. Tzafestas, editor, Advanced techniques and applications, in series Robotic Systems, vol. 10, pp. 495-503. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992. (Compressed Postscript)