Monitoring indoor environments using intelligent mobile sensors

Mobile robots offering services like transportation tasks enter various areas of our daily work-life. In this paper, the authors present a concept for monitoring indoor environments using intelligent mobile robots. The basic components in this concept are the autonomously or semi-autonomously acting mobile robots, which should unburden the staff in their everyday duties. The paper describes both the system architecture based on the blackboard concept, and the structure of the individual modules (agents). As an example the authors describe a world-modeling agent, a path-planning agent and a navigation agent. Moreover, a humanlike and easy to use 3D user interface to control the robots is presented.