DEMO 89-the initial experiment with the HERMIES-III robot

Abstract

HERMIES-III is a large mobile robot designed for human-scale experiments. The initial experiment with the robot (DEMO 89) was the cleanup of a simulated chemical spill. To perform the experiment, the robot was required to plan a path through an already known world, navigate along the path (avoiding unexpected obstacles), and locate and remove debris from a target area. A description is given of the software system that was developed to perform the experiment. The software system consisted of 19 processes that operated on a distributed set of heterogeneous computers.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>