Situation-Aware Self-Adaptive Localisation Framework

Abstract

Substantial efforts are being made to make robots more reliable and safe to work around humans. Robots often perform flawless demos in a controlled environment under the supervision of an operator but tend to fail in the real world when deployed for a long period of time due to faults and environmental disturbances. A robotic system is composed of different physical and software components whose characteristics are likely to change over time. Assumptions made about the system during the design phase may change over time, especially when a system is deployed for long periods. Such changes that are often ignored, need to be considered. Environments in which a robot operates are dynamic with high uncertainty and unpredictability. In such scenarios, capabilities such as situational awareness and self-adaptation will be useful to create more robust, resilient and reliable solutions. The objective for this thesis work is to develop a framework which will embed capabilities such as situational-awareness, context-awareness and self-adaptation within a robot. This research provides a novel, reusable and generalised localisation framework called Situation-Aware Self-Adaptive (SASA) localisation framework for robotics application. This framework is developed using knowledge representation and reasoning which will provide a robot with the capability of adapting according to the situation. We have demonstrated the applicability of the SASA framework to a mobile robot localisation use case. In this research work, we have demonstrated the performance of the framework during environmental disturbances due to poor illumination and featureless environment and internal fault due to component failure. We have also demonstrated the reusability, changeability and the consistency of SASA framework. This work showed that the situational-awareness and self-adaptation capability enhances the robot’s localisation ability and provides reliable localisation even in the case of environmental uncertainties and internal faults where conventional localisation systems fail. This thesis represents a leap forward in the direction of creating more reliable and resilient solutions for robotic applications and it lays the foundations for further research in this direction.