Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) market is predicted to grow annually by 34.3% in the next 10 years and will reach US$22.15 billion in 2030. It is expected that AMRs will play a key role as human counterparts and caregivers in both industrial and daily-life settings. AMRs not only replace humans in minimizing their hands-on tasks but also closely work with humans to help them focus on cognitively demanding tasks in shared workplaces. However, to bring AMRs and its potential applications into social environments, the robots must be leveraged with high-level perception for socially aware reasoning and decision-making as well as socially compliant navigability. These capabilities will empower AMRs to safely and socially interact and collaborate with humans in human-robot shared workspaces. This 5-year NSERC-DG research program is designed to research and develop a unified framework for Socially Compliant Mobile Service Robots. The long-term objective of this research program is to leverage AMRs with social awareness and socially compliant maneuverability, enabling the robots to work safely and socially with humans in shared workplaces. The first short-term objective will leverage not only reliable, accurate, and robust human detection and tracking but also human intention prediction for social reasoning and decision making. The second short-term objective is to reinforce AMRs with socially compliant avoiding, approaching, and accompanying navigability to enable the robots to operate in human-inhabited environments. The developed systems and algorithms of the project will be examined and validated on many mobile robot platforms available in the lab and lent from the industrial partners. The significance and impact of this 5-year research programs are threefold: 1) Disseminating scientific findings to enrich the literature body of the mobile robotics field through scholar journals and conference presentations. 2) Contributing to the training of highly qualified personnel (HQP) who will directly contribute their highest level of knowledge and expertise to industry and society. 3) Transferring know-how knowledge and developed technologies to industrial partners to create new advanced technologies and intellectual productions, resulting in the growth of Canada's technological market.