A General-purpose Transportation Robot An Outline of Work in Progress

An outline of a current joint project between Chalmers University of Technology (in Sweden) and several Japanese universities (Waseda University, Future University, and the University of Tsukuba) is presented. The aim of the project is to build a general-purpose transportation robot for use in hospitals, industries, and similar facilities. The project will provide a thorough test of the recently developed utility function method for behavior selection, which will be used for generating the decision-making system in the transportation robot. In this paper, an outline of the proposed transportation robot is given, along with a brief description of some of the challenges arising from this project. Furthermore, the utility function method is presented. Finally, the results obtained thus far are briefly discussed, and some directions for further work are provided