40,611 research outputs found
Engineering sensorial delay to control phototaxis and emergent collective behaviors
Collective motions emerging from the interaction of autonomous mobile
individuals play a key role in many phenomena, from the growth of bacterial
colonies to the coordination of robotic swarms. For these collective behaviours
to take hold, the individuals must be able to emit, sense and react to signals.
When dealing with simple organisms and robots, these signals are necessarily
very elementary, e.g. a cell might signal its presence by releasing chemicals
and a robot by shining light. An additional challenge arises because the motion
of the individuals is often noisy, e.g. the orientation of cells can be altered
by Brownian motion and that of robots by an uneven terrain. Therefore, the
emphasis is on achieving complex and tunable behaviors from simple autonomous
agents communicating with each other in robust ways. Here, we show that the
delay between sensing and reacting to a signal can determine the individual and
collective long-term behavior of autonomous agents whose motion is
intrinsically noisy. We experimentally demonstrate that the collective
behaviour of a group of phototactic robots capable of emitting a radially
decaying light field can be tuned from segregation to aggregation and
clustering by controlling the delay with which they change their propulsion
speed in response to the light intensity they measure. We track this transition
to the underlying dynamics of this system, in particular, to the ratio between
the robots' sensorial delay time and the characteristic time of the robots'
random reorientation. Supported by numerics, we discuss how the same mechanism
can be applied to control active agents, e.g. airborne drones, moving in a
three-dimensional space.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms
The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent âdevicesâ, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew âcognitive devicesâ are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications
Developmental Robots - A New Paradigm
It has been proved to be extremely challenging for humans to program a robot to such a sufficient degree that it acts properly in a typical unknown human environment. This is especially true for a humanoid robot due to the very large number of redundant degrees of freedom and a large number of sensors that are required for a humanoid to work safely and effectively in the human environment. How can we address this fundamental problem? Motivated by human mental development from infancy to adulthood, we present a theory, an architecture, and some experimental results showing how to enable a robot to develop its mind automatically, through online, real time interactions with its environment. Humans mentally âraiseâ the robot through ârobot sittingâ and ârobot schoolsâ instead of task-specific robot programming
First Steps Towards an Ethics of Robots and Artificial Intelligence
This article offers an overview of the main first-order ethical questions raised by robots and Artificial Intelligence (RAIs) under five broad rubrics: functionality, inherent significance, rights and responsibilities, side-effects, and threats. The first letter of each rubric taken together conveniently generates the acronym FIRST. Special attention is given to the rubrics of functionality and inherent significance given the centrality of the former and the tendency to neglect the latter in virtue of its somewhat nebulous and contested character. In addition to exploring some illustrative issues arising under each rubric, the article also emphasizes a number of more general themes. These include: the multiplicity of interacting levels on which ethical questions about RAIs arise, the need to recognise that RAIs potentially implicate the full gamut of human values (rather than exclusively or primarily some readily identifiable sub-set of ethical or legal principles), and the need for practically salient ethical reflection on RAIs to be informed by a realistic appreciation of their existing and foreseeable capacities
A Pilot Study with a Novel Setup for Collaborative Play of the Humanoid Robot KASPAR with children with autism
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.This article describes a pilot study in which a novel experimental setup, involving an autonomous humanoid robot, KASPAR, participating in a collaborative, dyadic video game, was implemented and tested with children with autism, all of whom had impairments in playing socially and communicating with others. The children alternated between playing the collaborative video game with a neurotypical adult and playing the same game with the humanoid robot, being exposed to each condition twice. The equipment and experimental setup were designed to observe whether the children would engage in more collaborative behaviours while playing the video game and interacting with the adult than performing the same activities with the humanoid robot. The article describes the development of the experimental setup and its first evaluation in a small-scale exploratory pilot study. The purpose of the study was to gain experience with the operational limits of the robot as well as the dyadic video game, to determine what changes should be made to the systems, and to gain experience with analyzing the data from this study in order to conduct a more extensive evaluation in the future. Based on our observations of the childrensâ experiences in playing the cooperative game, we determined that while the children enjoyed both playing the game and interacting with the robot, the game should be made simpler to play as well as more explicitly collaborative in its mechanics. Also, the robot should be more explicit in its speech as well as more structured in its interactions. Results show that the children found the activity to be more entertaining, appeared more engaged in playing, and displayed better collaborative behaviours with their partners (For the purposes of this article, âpartnerâ refers to the human/robotic agent which interacts with the children with autism. We are not using the termâs other meanings that refer to specific relationships or emotional involvement between two individuals.) in the second sessions of playing with human adults than during their first sessions. One way of explaining these findings is that the childrenâs intermediary play session with the humanoid robot impacted their subsequent play session with the human adult. However, another longer and more thorough study would have to be conducted in order to better re-interpret these findings. Furthermore, although the children with autism were more interested in and entertained by the robotic partner, the children showed more examples of collaborative play and cooperation while playing with the human adult.Peer reviewe
Should we campaign against sex robots?
In September 2015 a well-publicised Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR) was launched. Modelled on the longer-standing Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, the CASR opposes the development of sex robots on the grounds that the technology is being developed with a particular model of female-male relations (the prostitute-john model) in mind, and that this will prove harmful in various ways. In this chapter, we consider carefully the merits of campaigning against such a technology. We make three main arguments. First, we argue that the particular claims advanced by the CASR are unpersuasive, partly due to a lack of clarity about the campaignâs aims and partly due to substantive defects in the main ethical objections put forward by campaignâs founder(s). Second, broadening our inquiry beyond the arguments proferred by the campaign itself, we argue that it would be very difficult to endorse a general campaign against sex robots unless one embraced a highly conservative attitude towards the ethics of sex, which is likely to be unpalatable to those who are active in the campaign. In making this argument we draw upon lessons from the campaign against killer robots. Finally, we conclude by suggesting that although a generalised campaign against sex robots is unwarranted, there are legitimate concerns that one can raise about the development of sex robots
Plane Formation by Synchronous Mobile Robots in the Three Dimensional Euclidean Space
Creating a swarm of mobile computing entities frequently called robots,
agents or sensor nodes, with self-organization ability is a contemporary
challenge in distributed computing. Motivated by this, we investigate the plane
formation problem that requires a swarm of robots moving in the three
dimensional Euclidean space to land on a common plane. The robots are fully
synchronous and endowed with visual perception. But they do not have
identifiers, nor access to the global coordinate system, nor any means of
explicit communication with each other. Though there are plenty of results on
the agreement problem for robots in the two dimensional plane, for example, the
point formation problem, the pattern formation problem, and so on, this is the
first result for robots in the three dimensional space. This paper presents a
necessary and sufficient condition for fully-synchronous robots to solve the
plane formation problem that does not depend on obliviousness i.e., the
availability of local memory at robots. An implication of the result is
somewhat counter-intuitive: The robots cannot form a plane from most of the
semi-regular polyhedra, while they can form a plane from every regular
polyhedron (except a regular icosahedron), whose symmetry is usually considered
to be higher than any semi-regular polyhedrdon
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