Network robot systems

This article introduces the definition of Network Robot Systems (NRS) as is understood in Europe, USA and Japan. Moreover, it describes some of the NRS projects in Europe and Japan and presents a summary of the papers of this Special Issue.Peer Reviewe

Steps Toward End-to-End Personalized AAL Services

In Ambient Assisted Living research and development, a significant effort has been dedicated to issues like gathering continuous information at home, standardizing formats in order to create environments more easily, extracting further information from raw data using different techniques to reconstruct context. An aspect relatively less developed but also important is the design of personalized end-to-end services for technology users being them either primary (older people) or secondary (medical doctors, caregiver, relatives). This paper explores an effort, internal to the EU project GIRAFFPLUS, for designing such services starting from a state-of-the-art continuous data gathering infrastructure. The paper presents the general project idea, the current choices for the middleware infrastructure and the pursued direction for a set of services personalized to different classes of users

Heterogeneous context-aware robots providing a personalized building tour regular paper

Existing robot guides offer a tour of a building, such as a museum or science centre, to one or more visitors. Usually the tours are predefined and lack support for dynamic interactions between the different robots. This paper focuses on the distributed collaboration of multiple heterogeneous robots (receptionist, companion) guiding visitors through a building. Semantic techniques support the formal definition of tour topics, the available content on a specific topic, and the robot and person profiles including interests and acquired knowledge. The robot guides select topics depending on their participants' interests and prior knowledge. Whenever one guide moves into the proximity of another, the guides automatically exchange participants, optimizing the amount of interesting topics. Robot collaboration is realized through the development of a software module that allows a robot to transparently include behaviours performed by other robots into its own set of behaviours. The multi-robot visitor guide application is integrated into an extended distributed heterogeneous robot team, using a receptionist robot that was not originally designed to cooperate with the guides. Evaluation of the implemented algorithms presents a 90% content coverage of relevant topics for the participants

OpenCV WebCam Applications in an Arduino-based Rover

International audienceIn this work we design and implement Arduino-based Rovers with characteristics of re-programmability, modularity in terms of type and number of components, communication capability, equipped with motion support and capability to exploit information both from the surrounding and from other wireless devices. These latter can be homogeneous devices (i.e. others similar rovers) and heterogeneous devices (i.e. laptops, smartphones, etc.). We propose a Behavioral Algorithm that is implemented on our devices in order to supply a proof-of-concept of the e ectiveness of a Detection task. Speci cally, we implement the "Object Detection" and "Face Recognition" techniques based on OpenCV and we detail the modi cations necessary to work on distributed devices. We show the e ectiveness of the controlled mobility concept in order to accomplish a task, both in a centralized way (i.e. driven by a central computer that assign the task) and in a totally distributed fashion, in cooperation with other Rovers. We also highlight the limitations of similar devices required to accomplish speci c tasks and their potentiality

Ubiquitous Robotic Technology for Smart Manufacturing System

As the manufacturing tasks become more individualized and more flexible, the machines in smart factory are required to do variable tasks collaboratively without reprogramming. This paper for the first time discusses the similarity between smart manufacturing systems and the ubiquitous robotic systems and makes an effort on deploying ubiquitous robotic technology to the smart factory. Specifically, a component based framework is proposed in order to enable the communication and cooperation of the heterogeneous robotic devices. Further, compared to the service robotic domain, the smart manufacturing systems are often in larger size. So a hierarchical planning method was implemented to improve the planning efficiency. A test bed of smart factory is developed. It demonstrates that the proposed framework is suitable for industrial domain, and the hierarchical planning method is able to solve large problems intractable with flat methods

Sélection contextuelle de services continus pour la robotique ambiante

La robotique ambiante s'intéresse à l'introduction de robots mobiles au sein d'environnements actifs où ces derniers fournissent des fonctionnalités alternatives ou complémentaires à celles embarquées par les robots mobiles. Cette thèse étudie la mise en concurrence des fonctionnalités internes et externes aux robots, qu'elle pose comme un problème de sélection de services logiciels. La sélection de services consiste à choisir un service ou une combinaison de services parmi un ensemble de candidats capables de réaliser une tâche requise. Pour cela, elle doit prédire et évaluer la performance des candidats. Ces performances reposent sur des critères non-fonctionnels comme la durée d'exécution, le coût ou le bruit. Ce domaine applicatif a pour particularité de nécessiter une coordination étroite entre certaines de ses fonctionnalités. Cette coordination se traduit par l'échange de flots de données entre les fonctionnalités durant leurs exécutions. Les fonctionnalités productrices de ces flots sont modélisées comme des services continus. Cette nouvelle catégorie de services logiciels impose que les compositions de services soient hiérarchiques et introduit des contraintes supplémentaires pour la sélection de services. Cette thèse met en évidence la présence d'un important couplage non-fonctionnel entre les performances des instances de services de différents niveaux, même lorsque les flots de données sont unidirectionnels. L'approche proposée se concentre sur la prédiction de la performance d'une instance de haut-niveau sachant son organigramme à l'issue de la sélection. Un organigramme regroupe l'ensemble des instances de services sollicitées pour réaliser une tâche de haut-niveau. L'étude s'appuie sur un scénario impliquant la sélection d'un service de positionnement en vue de permettre le déplacement d'un robot vers une destination requise. Pour un organigramme considéré, la prédiction de performance d'une instance de haut-niveau de ce scénario introduit les exigences suivantes : elle doit (i)être contextuelle en tenant compte, par exemple, du chemin suivi pour atteindre la destination requise, (ii) prendre en charge le remplacement d'une instance de sous-service suite à un échec ou, par extension, de façon opportuniste. En conséquence, cette sélection de services est posée comme un problème de prise de décision séquentielle formalisé à l'aide de processus de décision markoviens à horizon fini. La dimensionnalité importante du contexte en comparaison à la fréquence des déplacements du robot rend inadaptées les méthodes consistant à apprendre directement une fonction de valeur ou une fonction de transition. L'approche proposée repose sur des modèles de dynamique locaux et exploite le chemin de déplacement calculé par un sous-service pour estimer en ligne les valeurs des organigrammes disponibles dans l'état courant. Cette estimation est effectuée par l'intermédiaire d'une méthode de fouille stochastique d'arbre, Upper Confidence bounds applied to TreesAmbient robotics aims at introducing mobile robots in active environments where the latter provide new or alternative functionalities to those shipped by mobile robots. This thesis studies the competition between robot and external functionalities, which is set as a service selection problem. Service selection consists in choosing a service or a combination of services among a set of candidates able to fulfil a given request. To do this, it has to predict and evaluate candidate performances. These performances are based on non-functional requirements such as execution time, cost or noise. This application domain requires tight coordination between some of its functionalities. Tight coordination involves setting data streams between functionalities during their execution. In this proposal, functionalities producing data streams are modelled as continuous services. This new service category requires hierarchical service composition and adds some constraints to the service selection problem. This thesis shows that an important non-functional coupling appears between service instances at different levels, even when data streams are unidirectional. The proposed approach focuses on performance prediction of an high-level service instance given its organigram. This organigram gathers service instances involved in the high-level task processing. The scenario included in this study is the selection of a positioning service involved in a robot navigation high-level service. For a given organigram, performance prediction of an high-level service instance of this scenario has to: (i) be contextual by, for instance, considering moving path towards the required destination, (ii) support service instance replacement after a failure or in an opportunist manner. Consequently, this service selection is set as a sequential decision problem and is formalized as a finite-horizon Markov decision process. Its high contextual dimensionality with respect to robot moving frequency makes direct learning of Q-value functions or transition functions inadequate. The proposed approachre lies on local dynamic models and uses the planned moving path to estimate Q-values of organigrams available in the initial state. This estimation is done using a Monte-Carlo tree search method, Upper Confidence bounds applied to TreesPARIS-EST-Université (770839901) / SudocSudocFranceF