Analysis and Observations from the First Amazon Picking Challenge

This paper presents a overview of the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge along with a summary of a survey conducted among the 26 participating teams. The challenge goal was to design an autonomous robot to pick items from a warehouse shelf. This task is currently performed by human workers, and there is hope that robots can someday help increase efficiency and throughput while lowering cost. We report on a 28-question survey posed to the teams to learn about each team's background, mechanism design, perception apparatus, planning and control approach. We identify trends in this data, correlate it with each team's success in the competition, and discuss observations and lessons learned based on survey results and the authors' personal experiences during the challenge

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 “devices”, 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 “cognitive devices” 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

Multi-Agent Task Allocation for Robot Soccer

This is the published version. Copyright De GruyterThis paper models and analyzes task allocation methodologies for multiagent systems. The evaluation process was implemented as a collection of simulated soccer matches. A soccer-simulation software package was used as the test-bed as it provided the necessary features for implementing and testing the methodologies. The methodologies were tested through competitions with a number of available soccer strategies. Soccer game scores, communication, robustness, fault-tolerance, and replanning capabilities were the parameters used as the evaluation criteria for the mul1i-agent systems

High level coordination and decision making of a simulated robotic soccer team

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

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

Suitable task allocation in intelligent systems for assistive environments

The growing need of technological assistance to provide support to people with special needs demands for systems more and more efficient and with better performances. With this aim, this work tries to advance in a multirobot platform that allows the coordinated control of different agents and other elements in the environment to achieve an autonomous behavior based on the user’s needs or will. Therefore, this environment is structured according to the potentiality of each agent and elements of this environment and of the dynamic context, to generate the adequate actuation plans and the coordination of their execution.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Situation based strategic positioning for coordinating a team of homogeneous agents

. In this paper we are proposing an approach for coordinating a team ofhomogeneous agents based on a flexible common Team Strategy as well as onthe concepts of Situation Based Strategic Positioning and Dynamic Positioningand Role Exchange. We also introduce an Agent Architecture including a specifichigh-level decision module capable of implementing this strategy. Ourproposal is based on the formalization of what is a team strategy for competingwith an opponent team having opposite goals. A team strategy is composed of aset of agent types and a set of tactics, which are also composed of several formations.Formations are used for different situations and assign each agent a defaultspatial positioning and an agent type (defining its behaviour at several levels).Agents reactivity is also introduced for appropriate response to the dynamicsof the current situation. However, in our approach this is done in a way thatpreserves team coherence instead of permitting uncoordinated agent behaviour.We have applied, with success, this coordination approach to the RoboSoccersimulated domain. The FC Portugal team, developed using this approach wonthe RoboCup2000 (simulation league) European and World championshipsscoring a total of 180 goals and conceding none