Combining motion planning with social reward sources for collaborative human-robot navigation task design

Across the human history, teamwork is one of the main pillars sustaining civilizations and technology development. In consequence, as the world embraces omatization, human-robot collaboration arises naturally as a cornerstone. This applies to a huge spectrum of tasks, most of them involving navigation. As a result, tackling pure collaborative navigation tasks can be a good first foothold for roboticists in this enterprise. In this thesis, we define a useful framework for knowledge representation in human-robot collaborative navigation tasks and propose a first solution to the human-robot collaborative search task. After validating the model, two derived projects tackling its main weakness are introduced: the compilation of a human search dataset and the implementation of a multi-agent planner for human-robot navigatio

A Survey of User Interfaces for Robot Teleoperation

Robots are used today to accomplish many tasks in society, be it in industry, at home, or as helping tools on tragic incidents. The human-robot systems currently developed span a broad variety of applications and are typically very different from one another. The interaction techniques designed for each system are also very different, although some effort has been directed in defining common properties and strategies for guiding human-robot interaction (HRI) development. This work aims to present the state-of-the-art in teleoperation interaction techniques between robots and their users. By presenting potentially useful design models and motivating discussions on topics to which the research community has been paying little attention lately, we also suggest solutions to some of the design and operational problems being faced in this area

RoboCup@Home: Analysis and results of evolving competitions for domestic and service robots

Scientific competitions are becoming more common in many research areas of artificial intelligence and robotics, since they provide a shared testbed for comparing different solutions and enable the exchange of research results. Moreover, they are interesting for general audiences and industries. Currently, many major research areas in artificial intelligence and robotics are organizing multiple-year competitions that are typically associated with scientific conferences. One important aspect of such competitions is that they are organized for many years. This introduces a temporal evolution that is interesting to analyze. However, the problem of evaluating a competition over many years remains unaddressed. We believe that this issue is critical to properly fuel changes over the years and measure the results of these decisions. Therefore, this article focuses on the analysis and the results of evolving competitions. In this article, we present the RoboCup@Home competition, which is the largest worldwide competition for domestic service robots, and evaluate its progress over the past seven years. We show how the definition of a proper scoring system allows for desired functionalities to be related to tasks and how the resulting analysis fuels subsequent changes to achieve general and robust solutions implemented by the teams. Our results show not only the steadily increasing complexity of the tasks that RoboCup@Home robots can solve but also the increased performance for all of the functionalities addressed in the competition. We believe that the methodology used in RoboCup@Home for evaluating competition advances and for stimulating changes can be applied and extended to other robotic competitions as well as to multi-year research projects involving Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Robot–City Interaction: Mapping the Research Landscape—A Survey of the Interactions Between Robots and Modern Cities

The goal of this work is to describe how robots interact with complex city environments, and to identify the main characteristics of an emerging field that we call Robot--City Interaction (RCI). Given the central role recently gained by modern cities as use cases for the deployment of advanced technologies, and the advancements achieved in the robotics field in recent years, we assume that there is an increasing interest both in integrating robots in urban ecosystems, and in studying how they can interact and benefit from each others. Therefore, our challenge becomes to verify the emergence of such area, to assess its current state and to identify the main characteristics, core themes and research challenges associated with it. This is achieved by reviewing a preliminary body of work contributing to this area, which we classify and analyze according to an analytical framework including a set of key dimensions for the area of RCI. Such review not only serves as a preliminary state-of-the-art in the area, but also allows us to identify the main characteristics of RCI and its research landscape

Technology assessment of advanced automation for space missions

Six general classes of technology requirements derived during the mission definition phase of the study were identified as having maximum importance and urgency, including autonomous world model based information systems, learning and hypothesis formation, natural language and other man-machine communication, space manufacturing, teleoperators and robot systems, and computer science and technology

Combining task and motion planning:challenges and guidelines

Combined Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) is an area where no one-fits-all solution can exist. Many aspects of the domain, as well as operational requirements, have an effect on how algorithms and representations are designed. Frequently, trade-offs have to be made to build a system that is effective. We propose five research questions that we believe need to be answered to solve real-world problems that involve combined TAMP. We show which decisions and trade-offs should be made with respect to these research questions, and illustrate these on examples of existing application domains. By doing so, this article aims to provide a guideline for designing combined TAMP solutions that are adequate and effective in the target scenario

The Internet of Robotic Things:A review of concept, added value and applications

The Internet of Robotic Things is an emerging vision that brings together pervasive sensors and objects with robotic and autonomous systems. This survey examines how the merger of robotic and Internet of Things technologies will advance the abilities of both the current Internet of Things and the current robotic systems, thus enabling the creation of new, potentially disruptive services. We discuss some of the new technological challenges created by this merger and conclude that a truly holistic view is needed but currently lacking.Funding Agency:imec ACTHINGS High Impact initiative</p

Towards an interactive framework for robot dancing applications

Estágio realizado no INESC-Porto e orientado pelo Prof. Doutor Fabien GouyonTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores - Major Telecomunicações. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200