Mobile robotics in the long term-exploring the fourth dimension

Explores the issues involved in deployment of mobile robots in real-world situations and presents solutions and approaches under development at the Australian National University. For deployment of mobile robots outside of the laboratory, long-term operation is required. Hence, we have developed an automatic recharging system. In addition, a Web-based teleoperation system is used to provide missions to test the long-term reliability of the robot. The final aspect of real-world operation that is explored here is operations in dynamic environments. To date, researchers have assumed static environments for mapping and localisation. We propose methods to avoid this restriction.