The Skilligent technology allows a non-professional user to train a service robot to perform a new task in a particular environment. For example:

• A restaurant owner can train a team of service robots to deliver orders in the restaurant.
• A soldier can train a robot to patrol a particular area and to react on certain events.
• A floor manager at an assisted living facility can train a team of service robots to automatically scan the health of patients, remind them of the need to take the medications and entertain the patients .
• An owner of a budget-priced motel can train a team of service robots to guide guests to their rooms, carry baggage, make deliveries, and patrol the area.

The examples highlight the key advantage of the technology - a user who is not an educated robotics professional, uses the off-the-shelf trainable robots for service automation tasks.

Due to ever increasing competition, small businesses have to change their product lines or services often. Each time a product or a service is updated, a number of installed industrial robots need to be re-programmed. Each time a robot gets re-programmed, the small business loses money. In most cases, small businesses have to hire an external system integration company to do the work.

If an service robot is able to learn procedures and acquire skills, such a robot can be re-trained by an employee when needed - vs. re-programmed by a robotics engineer working for a system integration company. For small businesses, this means a significant reduction of the overall cost of ownership.

The ability of tactical robots to learn procedures and skills directly from soldiers gives the armed forces an edge over the adversaries.

Because the robot training process does not require any special technical knowledge, nearly any soldier (vs. a robotics engineer) can train a robot to perform new missions in a particular environment.

For example,

• A biochemical defense robot can be pre-trained to act in case of a biochemical attack. As the robot has been pre-trained, it will be able to automatically inspect and clean a territory such as a campus, a street - or other territory where it was pre-trained to operate. In case of an attack, the robot needs to be deployed in the area - and it will know what to do.
• At a maintenance facility, a service robot can be trained by a soldier to perform service assignments such as moving materials around, cleaning, palletizing, and sorting and so on.
• A military robot can be pre-trained to patrol a particular area such as a street or a checkpoint. A soldier can pre-train a robot to patrol an area, react automatically on different kinds of events and operate autonomously in a particular environment. In case of emergency, such a robot can be deployed in that area in order to secure it.

Skilligent Robot Learning and Behavior Control System can be used for research in the frontier areas of robotics such as:

• Behavior Control and Coordination
• Robot Learning from Demonstration/Experience/Observation
• Task/Procedure Learning
• Skill Learning, generation of controllers, Feature Selection and Discretization, Adaptive Controllers, Multivariable Controllers
• Computer Vision: Visual Servoing, Object Recognition, Stereo Vision, Image Feature Detectors, Scale Invariant Features
• Sound Recognition, Speech Emergence
• Attention Systems
• Human-to-robot interaction, Teamwork, Joint Intention, Speech Emergence, Social Interaction, Social Cues
• Navigation/SLAM
• Advanced Remote Control and Telepresence
• Simulations, Augmented Reality
• Robot Safety

The control system has a modular structure. During a research project, various built-in modules can be replaced with or complemented by new modules in order to improve the system or perform specific research. The diagram below shows various external software modules which can be attached to the core of Skilligent Robot Learning and Behavior Control System.

Skilligent Robot Learning and Behavior Control System can be integrated with various existing robotics software platforms such as Microsoft Robotics Studio. Integration with the Microsoft's robotics platform is currently in progress; integration with other robotic software platforms is planned in subsequent releases. Skilligent software runs as a standalone control system or utilizes those platforms as a hardware abstraction layer or a unified execution environment.

Due to componentized architecture of the Skilligent Robot Learning and Behavior Control System, it can be integrated with various existing software components including:

1. Robotics software platforms
2. Simulation Environments
3. SLAM/navigation systems
4. Computer Vision systems
5. Speech Recognition Systems
6. Tele-operation, remote control, telepresence systems
7. Swarm coordination systems