A general plan supported by hardware, software shells, senior/graduate courses and graduate research is in place that facilitates the evolution of autonomous mobile robots capable of navigating and performing prototypic tasks in semi-structured environments. A series of projects is designed to enhance the repertoire of skills of the robots to robustly accomplish a range of tasks from simple to complex. The skills are built within a structure that is designed to be cumulative. The result is forecast to be systematic improvement in a generalized knowledge base that is identified as the key to implementation of semi-autonomous mobile robots in semi-structured environments.

A university is an educational institution. This means that students are temporary. Students are always on a learning curve and they complete courses and degrees and leave the institution. One important component for achieving the goal of a continually evolving mobile robotic vehicle in the university environment is to document incremental student progress and package this information so that future students can rapidly assimilate previous progress and make a contribution to the continuing evolution of the mobile robotics program. This is accomplished through a set of modules called “robo-tutors”. Robo-tutors are tutorials for students that are written in an expert system shell and provide automated instruction concerning various aspects of the mobile robots program.