What Are Pioneer and PeopleBot?
Chapter 2
The Performance PeopleBot™ is an
intelligent mobile robot specially
designed and equipped for human-
robot interaction research and
applications. It is member of the
Pioneer family of mobile robots, which
are research and development
platforms that share a common
architecture, foundation software, and
employ a client-server robotics control
architecture that was originally
developed by Kurt Konolige, Ph.D., of
SRI International, Inc. and Stanford
University.
Figure 2. ActivMedia Robots
P
IONEER
R
EFERENCE
P
LATFORM
Activ
Media robots set the standards for
intelligent mobile platforms by containing all of
the basic components for sensing and
navigation in a real-world environment. They
have become reference platforms in a wide
variety of research projects, including several
US Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) funded studies.
Figure 3. The Performance
PeopleBot sports an attractive body
design and bundled systems,
including voice synthesis and
recognition for human-robot
interaction research and
applications.
Every
Activ
Media robot comes complete with
a sturdy aluminum body, balanced drive
system (two-wheel differential with balancing
caster or four-wheel skid-steer), reversible DC
motors, motor-control and drive electronics,
high-resolution motion encoders, and long-life,
hot-swappable battery power, all managed by
an onboard microcontroller and mobile-robot
server software.
Besides the open-systems
Activ
Media Robotics
Operating System (AROS) software in the
robot’s microcontroller, every
Activ
Media robot
comes with a host of advanced robot-control
client software applications and application-
development environments. Software
development includes our own foundation
Activ
Media Robotics Interface for Applications
(ARIA), released under the GNU Public License
and complete with fully documented C++
libraries and source code. SRI International’s
Saphira robotics development system with
simulator and GUI, as well as support for
advanced localization and gradient-based
navigation comes bundled, too. Several third-
party robotics applications development
environments also have emerged from the
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