Robotic Reliability Engineering: Experience from Long-term TritonBot Development

EasyChair Preprint 1270

Abstract

While many researchers have built service robot prototypes that work perfectly under close human supervision, deploying an autonomous robot in an open environment for a long time is not always trivial. This paper presents our experience with TritonBot, a long-term autonomous receptionist and tour guide robot. We used TritonBot as an example to study reliability challenges in long-term autonomous service robots. During the past two years, we regularly do maintenance, fix issues, and roll out new features. In the process, we identified reliability engineering challenges in three aspects of long-term autonomy: scalability, resilience, and learning; we also formulated techniques to confront these challenges. Our experience shows that proper engineering practices and design principles reduces manual interventions and increases general reliability in long-term autonomous service robot deployments.

Keyphrases: Reliability, Resilience, Scalability, learning, long-term autonomy

@booklet{EasyChair:1270,
  author    = {Shengye Wang and Xiao Liu and Jishen Zhao and Henrik Christensen},
  title     = {Robotic Reliability Engineering: Experience from Long-term TritonBot Development},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1270},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}