Gamma Two Robotics

Gamma Two is a Denver-based robotics development company. We specialize in autonomous mobile robots for the home and office domains. Our robots utilize our proprietary 'Cybernetic Brain', a hierarchical system with multiple processors, including PCs and microcontrollers. Each robot's base has a perception action system that allows him to move about in the world. This system uses sonars to perceive the world, a motor system to move around, an encoder system to estimate position, and a reactive system to avoid obstacles. The main problem with purely reactive systems is that they can not reason about the world. Reasoning is a symbolic task, and therefore there must be a way to translate the raw data coming from the sensors into symbolic information. Our team of designers created a new type of software module, a reification engine that does this translation. This is analogous to the associative cortex in the animal brain. The robots can identify and differentiate common objects such as chairs, tables, corners, and (most importantly for service) people and maintain their position in a mental map. The robots have a probability-aware planning system that uses this mental map to plan sequences of actions. If a robot is commanded to get tea, it breaks this goal into a set of steps, such as: go to the kitchen, ask for tea, return to the table, deliver the tea. It knows where the kitchen is, and can recognize its specific sonar signature. If he gets lost he can ask for assistance or keep looking until he finds his destination, all the while safely navigating in a crowded space.

A high level representation of the Gamma Two Robotics Cybernetic Brain

The Cybernetic Brain enables the robots to:

• react to a dynamic world,
• deal with uncertainty,
• detect problems and develop plans to overcome obstacles,
• learn from its environment and adapt to changes.

Real Robots Now!