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Xavier
Head: Reid Simmons
Contact: Reid Simmons (reids@cs.cmu.edu)

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Associated lab/group: Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab

For more information, see this project's homepage.

This page last updated - January 1999.

Xavier was designed and built by CMU graduate students in 1993. The overall goal was to develop autonomous mobile robots that can operate reliably over extended periods of time, can learn and adapt to their environments, and can interact with people in a socially acceptable manner.

Over the years, Xavier has been used in many research projects. It was one of the first mobile robots to navigate using POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process) models, a technique that has since become quite popular due to its ability to tolerate noise. Xavier was the first autonomous mobile robot to be commanded from the Web, where users could send Xavier to various offices, take pictures, and tell knock-knock jokes. Xavier has since been used to investigate issues of multi-robot cooperation (the Mercator, DIRA, and TRESTLE projects) and human-robot social interaction.

Xavier is built on top of a 24-inch diameter, four-wheeled, synchro-drive base, built by Real-World Interfaces. Sensors include bump panels, a Denning sonar ring, a Nomadics laser light striper, and twin cameras mounted on a Directed Perception pan/tilt head for stereo vision. On-board computation consists of two 400 MHz computers and a new 1 GHz computer, all connected to each other via Ethernet and connected to the outside world via a Wavelan wireless card. Xavier runs a distributed, concurrent software system under the Linux operating system.

Name - Title <Email Address>
• [Home] Greg Armstrong - Senior Research Technician, CS <roboman@andrew.cmu.edu>
• Bradley Hamner - Research Programmer <bhamner@andrew.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Brennan Peter Sellner - PhD Student, RI <bsellner@andrew.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Reid Simmons - Research Prof/Assoc Dir Educ/PhD Chair <reids@cs.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Sanjiv Singh - Associate Research Professor <ssingh@ri.cmu.edu>

• Preliminary Results in Sliding Autonomy for Coordinated Teams
  J. Brookshire, S. Singh, and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of The 2004 Spring Symposium Series, March, 2004. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [414 KB] copyrighted

• Lessons Learned from Xavier
  R. Simmons, J.L. Fernandez, R. Goodwin, S. Koenig, and J. O'Sullivan
  Robotics and Automation Magazine, 2000, pp. 733 - 39. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [782 KB], ps.gz [1020 KB] copyrighted

• Xavier: An Autonomous Mobile Robot on the Web
  R. Simmons, J. Fernandez, R. Goodwin, S. Koenig, and J. O'Sullivan
  Robotics and Automation Magazine, 1999. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [782 KB], ps.gz [1020 KB] copyrighted

• Solving Robot Navigation Problems with Initial Pose Uncertainty Using Real-Time Heuristic Search
  S. Koenig and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems, 1998, pp. 144 - 153. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [99 KB], ps.gz [63 KB] copyrighted

• Xavier: A Robot Navigation Architecture Based on Partially Observable Markov Decision Process Models
  S. Koenig and R. Simmons
  Artificial Intelligence Based Mobile Robotics: Case Studies of Successful Robot Systems, D. Kortenkamp, R. Bonasso and R. Murphy, ed., MIT Press, 1998, pp. 91 - 122. [Abstract]

• A Layered Architecture for Office Delivery Robots
  R. Simmons, R. Goodwin, K. Haigh, S. Koenig, and J. Sullivan
  First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, February, 1997, pp. 235 - 242. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [230 KB], ps.gz [175 KB] copyrighted

• Sensor-Based Planning with the Freespace Assumption
  S. Koenig and Y. Smirnov
  Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '97), 1997. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [211 KB], ps.gz [74 KB] copyrighted

• Xavier: Experience with a Layered Robot Architecture
  R. Simmons, R. Goodwin, K. Haigh, S. Koenig, J. O'Sullivan, and M. Veloso
  Agents '97, 1997.
  Download: pdf [578 KB], ps.gz [906 KB] copyrighted

• The Curvature-Velocity Method for Local Obstacle Avoidance
  R. Simmons
  International Conference on Robotics and Automation, April, 1996.
  Download: pdf [64 KB], ps.gz [94 KB] copyrighted

• Passive Distance Learning for Robot Navigation
  S. Koenig and R. Simmons
  Proceedings ofthe Thirteenth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 1996, pp. 266 - 274. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [71 KB], ps.gz [322 KB] copyrighted