ASCCbot, an open mobile platform built in ASCC lab, is presented in this thesis. The hardware and software design of the ASCCbot makes it a robust, extendable and duplicable robot platform which is suitable for most mobile robotics research including navigation, mapping, localization, etc. ROS is adopted as the major software framework, which not only makes ASCCbot a open-source project, but also extends its network functions so that multi-robot network applications can be easily implemented based on multiple ASCCbots. Collaborative localization is designed to test the network features of the ASCCbot. A telepresence robot is built based on the ASCCbot. A Kinect-based human gesture recognition method is implemented for intuitive human-robot interaction on it. For the telepresence robot, a GUI is also created in which basic control commands, video streaming and 2D metric map rendering are presented. Last but not least, semantic mapping through human activity recognition is proposed as a novel approach to semantic mapping. For the human activity recognition part, a power-aware wireless motion sensor is designed and evaluated. The overall semantic mapping system is explained and tested in a mock apartment. The experiment results show that the activity recognition results are reliable, and the semantic map updating process is able to create an accurate semantic map which matches the real furniture layout. To sum up, the ASCCbot is a versatile mobile robot platform with basic functions as well as feature functions implemented. Complex high-level functions can be built upon the existing functions from the ASCCbot. With its duplicability, extendability and open-source feature, the ASCCbot will be very useful for mobile robotics research.School of Electrical & Computer Engineerin
