The Robot Household Marathon Experiment

In this paper, we present an experiment, designed to investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation. The experiment involves performing variations of mobile pick and place actions and opening/closing environment containers in a human household. The robot is expected to act completely autonomously for extended periods of time. We discuss the scientific challenges raised by the experiment as well as present our robotic system that can address these challenges and successfully perform all the tasks of the experiment. We present empirical results and the lessons learned as well as discuss where we hit limitations.