78,659 research outputs found
Robot Autonomy for Surgery
Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot
operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are
several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing
precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of
biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and
execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and
sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical
teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in
interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In
this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in
research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous
surgical robots
Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks
In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge,
and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor
Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system
that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining
certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control,
learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and
WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new
opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields
which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be
the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path
between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the
advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of
articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a
range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant
to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core
problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity,
localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the
existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from
robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in
the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature,
and identify topics that require more research attention in the future
The Contribution of Society to the Construction of Individual Intelligence
It is argued that society is a crucial factor in the construction of individual intelligence. In other words that it is important that intelligence is socially situated in an analogous way to the physical situation of robots. Evidence that this may be the case is taken from developmental linguistics, the social intelligence hypothesis, the complexity of society, the need for self-reflection and autism. The consequences for the development of artificial social agents is briefly considered. Finally some challenges for research into socially situated intelligence are highlighted
Coverage and Field Estimation on Bounded Domains by Diffusive Swarms
In this paper, we consider stochastic coverage of bounded domains by a
diffusing swarm of robots that take local measurements of an underlying scalar
field. We introduce three control methodologies with diffusion, advection, and
reaction as independent control inputs. We analyze the diffusion-based control
strategy using standard operator semigroup-theoretic arguments. We show that
the diffusion coefficient can be chosen to be dependent only on the robots'
local measurements to ensure that the swarm density converges to a function
proportional to the scalar field. The boundedness of the domain precludes the
need to impose assumptions on decaying properties of the scalar field at
infinity. Moreover, exponential convergence of the swarm density to the
equilibrium follows from properties of the spectrum of the semigroup generator.
In addition, we use the proposed coverage method to construct a
time-inhomogenous diffusion process and apply the observability of the heat
equation to reconstruct the scalar field over the entire domain from
observations of the robots' random motion over a small subset of the domain. We
verify our results through simulations of the coverage scenario on a 2D domain
and the field estimation scenario on a 1D domain.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 55th IEEE Conference on Decision
and Control (CDC 2016
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