Mission-oriented design: A fully autonomous mobile urban robot

This paper describes a fully autonomous mobile urban robot-X1, which can perform multiple tasks autonomously in an unknown urban environment without human guidance, including mobile reconnaissance, target searching, and object manipulation. The mission-oriented design, which allows reliability and extensibility of the robotic system, includes a high degree of modularity for both hardware and software architecture, and coordination between tasks. Our strategy specifically addresses fundamental issues such as autonomous navigation in unknown urban environments and vision-based object manipulation. All the functionalities have been proved effective in the real urban environments. The robot platform is being built to provide valuable experiences on autonomous robotics research.