In the field of robotics, there has recently been a tremendous
progress in the development of autonomous robots that offer various
services to their users. Typical services include support of elderly
people, cleaning, transportation and delivery tasks, exploration of
unaccessible hazardous environments, or surveillance. Most of the
systems developed so far, however, are restricted to indoor scenarios,
non-urban outdoor environments, or road usage with cars. There is
serious lack of capabilities of mobile robots to navigate safely in
highly populated outdoor environments. This ability, however, is a
key competence for a series of robotic applications.
The goal of the EUROPA project is to bridge this gap and to
develop the foundations for service robots designed to autonomously
navigate in urban environments outdoors as well as in shopping malls
and shops to provide various services to users including guidance,
delivery, and transportation. EUROPA will develop and apply
sophisticated probabilistic scene interpretation techniques to deal
with the unpredictable and changing environments. Based on data
gathered with its sensors, the robot will acquire a detailed model of
the environment, detect and track moving objects in the environment,
adapt its navigation behavior according to the current situation, and
communicate with its users in a natural way, even remotely. Key
innovations of the project are made by {\em robustly and reliable}
addressing the autonomous navigation problem in complex and populated
environments, the ability to build {\em appropriate} spatial models,
and by reasoning about them based on the {\em verbal and natural
interaction} with users. EUROPA is targeted at developing novel
technologies that will open new perspectives for commercial
applications of service robots in the future.
To validate the concepts developed in the project, the EUROPA
robot will be deployed in populated urban environments such as the
downtown area of Zurich, Switzerland, to solve a series of tasks
including transportation and guidance.