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:

Researchers:

G.D. van Albeda, G.R. Meijer, G. de Boer, J. Lagerberg, B. Krose, A. Visser, L.O.H. Hertzberger

Cooperations:

CAP VOLMAC BV, CSIC, FRAMATOME GROUP, HITEC LTD, ROBERT BOSCH GMBH, UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE, INDECON, FRAMENTEC SA, UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM

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