Towards full autonomy in mobile robot navigation and manipulation

Robot autonomy is a key for automatizing industrial production plants, facilitating responsive search and rescue (SAR), and for interacting in urban settings. This work presents mobile systems capable of carrying out these tasks and summarises experience from practical deployments in three different domains for navigation. For industry, a mobile manipulator is presented, which is used for dynamic precise docking and object handling. For SAR, a semi-autonomous system is presented which is used for sampling hazardous materials, manipulating tools, and for localizing nuclear radiation sources. To improve urban logistics, a mobile robot autonomously navigates complex outdoor environments using semantic mapping techniques. Future work will explore further advancements that strive toward increased flexibility, reasoning and universal applicability of mobile robots. The goal is to reduce training, onboarding and tool changing times to reduce manual interfacing times.