Tidying up a household environment using a mobile manipulator poses various challenges in robotics, such as adaptation to large real-world environmental variations, and safe and robust deployment in the presence of humans. The Partner Robot Challenge in World Robot Challenge (WRC) 2020, a global competition held in September 2021, benchmarked tidying tasks in the real home environments, and importantly, tested for full system performances. For this challenge, we developed an entire household service robot system, which leverages a data-driven approach to adapt to numerous edge cases that occur during the execution, instead of classical manual pre-programmed solutions. In this paper, we describe the core ingredients of the proposed robot system, including visual recognition, object manipulation, and motion planning. Our robot system won the second prize, verifying the effectiveness and potential of data-driven robot systems for mobile manipulation in home environments.

In this study, a novel framework for autonomous robot navigation system is proposed. The navigation system uses an edge-node map, which is easily created from electronic maps. Unlike a general self-localization method using an occupancy grid map or a 3D point cloud map, there is no need to run the robot in the target environment in advance to collect sensor data. In this system, the internal sensor is mainly used for self-localization. Assuming that the robot is running on the road, the position of the robot is estimated by associating the robot’s travel trajectory with the edge. In addition, node arrival determination is performed using branch point information obtained from the edge-node map. Because this system does not use map matching, robust self-localization is possible, even in a dynamic environment.

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