10,916 research outputs found
Challenging the Computational Metaphor: Implications for How We Think
This paper explores the role of the traditional computational metaphor in our thinking as computer scientists, its influence on epistemological styles, and its implications for our understanding of cognition. It proposes to replace the conventional metaphor--a sequence of steps--with the notion of a community of interacting entities, and examines the ramifications of such a shift on these various ways in which we think
Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey
With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments,
the ability of such systems to perceive, understand and anticipate human
behavior becomes increasingly important. Specifically, predicting future
positions of dynamic agents and planning considering such predictions are key
tasks for self-driving vehicles, service robots and advanced surveillance
systems. This paper provides a survey of human motion trajectory prediction. We
review, analyze and structure a large selection of work from different
communities and propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods based on
the motion modeling approach and level of contextual information used. We
provide an overview of the existing datasets and performance metrics. We
discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline directions for further
research.Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR),
37 page
Online Robot Introspection via Wrench-based Action Grammars
Robotic failure is all too common in unstructured robot tasks. Despite
well-designed controllers, robots often fail due to unexpected events. How do
robots measure unexpected events? Many do not. Most robots are driven by the
sense-plan act paradigm, however more recently robots are undergoing a
sense-plan-act-verify paradigm. In this work, we present a principled
methodology to bootstrap online robot introspection for contact tasks. In
effect, we are trying to enable the robot to answer the question: what did I
do? Is my behavior as expected or not? To this end, we analyze noisy wrench
data and postulate that the latter inherently contains patterns that can be
effectively represented by a vocabulary. The vocabulary is generated by
segmenting and encoding the data. When the wrench information represents a
sequence of sub-tasks, we can think of the vocabulary forming a sentence (set
of words with grammar rules) for a given sub-task; allowing the latter to be
uniquely represented. The grammar, which can also include unexpected events,
was classified in offline and online scenarios as well as for simulated and
real robot experiments. Multiclass Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were used
offline, while online probabilistic SVMs were are used to give temporal
confidence to the introspection result. The contribution of our work is the
presentation of a generalizable online semantic scheme that enables a robot to
understand its high-level state whether nominal or abnormal. It is shown to
work in offline and online scenarios for a particularly challenging contact
task: snap assemblies. We perform the snap assembly in one-arm simulated and
real one-arm experiments and a simulated two-arm experiment. This verification
mechanism can be used by high-level planners or reasoning systems to enable
intelligent failure recovery or determine the next most optima manipulation
skill to be used.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1609.0494
On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces
© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the userâs acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree â to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving usersâ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe
Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design
This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications
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