Advances in Intelligent Robotics and Collaborative Automation

This book provides an overview of a series of advanced research lines in robotics as well as of design and development methodologies for intelligent robots and their intelligent components. It represents a selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications IDAACS 2013 that were related to these topics. Its contents integrate state of the art computational intelligence based techniques for automatic robot control to novel distributed sensing and data integration methodologies that can be applied to intelligent robotics and automation systems. The objective of the text was to provide an overview of some of the problems in the field of robotic systems and intelligent automation and the approaches and techniques that relevant research groups within this area are employing to try to solve them.The contributions of the different authors have been grouped into four main sections:• Robots• Control and Intelligence• Sensing• Collaborative automationThe chapters have been structured to provide an easy to follow introduction to the topics that are addressed, including the most relevant references, so that anyone interested in this field can get started in the area

Advances in Intelligent Robotics and Collaborative Automation

This book provides an overview of a series of advanced research lines in robotics as well as of design and development methodologies for intelligent robots and their intelligent components. It represents a selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications IDAACS 2013 that were related to these topics. Its contents integrate state of the art computational intelligence based techniques for automatic robot control to novel distributed sensing and data integration methodologies that can be applied to intelligent robotics and automation systems. The objective of the text was to provide an overview of some of the problems in the field of robotic systems and intelligent automation and the approaches and techniques that relevant research groups within this area are employing to try to solve them.The contributions of the different authors have been grouped into four main sections:• Robots• Control and Intelligence• Sensing• Collaborative automationThe chapters have been structured to provide an easy to follow introduction to the topics that are addressed, including the most relevant references, so that anyone interested in this field can get started in the area

СИНТЕЗ УПРАВЛЕНИЯ ДЛЯ АВТОНОМНОЙ ГРУППЫ РОБОТОВ С ФАЗОВЫМИ ОГРАНИЧЕНИЯМИ МЕТОДОМ МНОГОСЛОЙНОГО СЕТЕВОГО ОПЕРАТОРА С РАССТАНОВКОЙ ПРИОРИТЕТОВ

We consider a control system synthesis problem for the small group of autonomous robots with state constraints and several possible initial conditions. The main control task for team of robots is to move the robots out of some current position to the specified terminal position without colliding with each other. Typically, the control synthesis for the group of robots consists of two phases: stabilization of the robot with respect to some point of the state space and the design of optimal trajectories. The trajectories must ensure that the robots move from the initial states to certain states of the terminal set without collisions. To avoid collision, the control system uses priorities based, for example, on a distance between the robot and its end position. Since there are phase constraints, ordinary stabilization of robots cannot ensure the safe movement of robots from different initial conditions to the terminal positions. The paper presents our new approach to solving the stabilization problem with phase constraints by multi-layer network operator. We show an example of synthesis of control for the group of four robots.Рассмотрена задача синтеза системы управления для малых групп автономных роботов с фазовыми ограничениями и несколькими возможными начальными условиями. Основная задача управления для группы роботов состоит в перемещении роботов из некоторых текущих позиций в заданные терминальные положения без столкновений между собой. Обычно синтез управления группой роботов состоит из двух этапов: стабилизация роботов относительно некоторой точки пространства состояний; построение оптимальных траекторий. Траектории должны обеспечить движение роботов из начальных состояний в определенные состояния из терминального множества без столкновений. Во избежание столкновений система управления использует приоритеты роботов, основанные, например, на расстоянии между роботом и его конечным положением. Ввиду наличия фазовых ограничений обычная стабилизация роботов не может обеспечить безопасного движения роботов из различных начальных условий в терминальное положение. В работе представлен новый подход авторов к решению задачи стабилизации с фазовыми ограничениями методом многослойного сетевого оператора. В статье приводится пример синтеза управления для четырех роботов

Human-Centric Machine Vision

Recently, the algorithms for the processing of the visual information have greatly evolved, providing efficient and effective solutions to cope with the variability and the complexity of real-world environments. These achievements yield to the development of Machine Vision systems that overcome the typical industrial applications, where the environments are controlled and the tasks are very specific, towards the use of innovative solutions to face with everyday needs of people. The Human-Centric Machine Vision can help to solve the problems raised by the needs of our society, e.g. security and safety, health care, medical imaging, and human machine interface. In such applications it is necessary to handle changing, unpredictable and complex situations, and to take care of the presence of humans

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 344)

This bibliography lists 125 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during January, 1989. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

Neural Networks and Q-Learning for Robotics

International audienceIntroductionBehavior-Based ApproachSupervised Learning of a BehaviorMiniature Mobile Robot KheperaIllustration: Reward-Penalty LearningReinforcement LearningGenetic AlgorithmsLearning Classifier SystemsGA & ANNQ-learningEvaluation FunctionAlgorithmReinforcement FunctionUpdate FunctionConvergenceLimitationsGeneralizationNeural Implementations of the Q-learningMultilayer Perceptron Implementation (ideal & Q-CON)Q-KOHONComparisonKnowledge IncorporationReinforcement Function DesignBuilding of a non-explicit ModelLearning in Cooperative RoboticsReference

Robot Manipulators

Robot manipulators are developing more in the direction of industrial robots than of human workers. Recently, the applications of robot manipulators are spreading their focus, for example Da Vinci as a medical robot, ASIMO as a humanoid robot and so on. There are many research topics within the field of robot manipulators, e.g. motion planning, cooperation with a human, and fusion with external sensors like vision, haptic and force, etc. Moreover, these include both technical problems in the industry and theoretical problems in the academic fields. This book is a collection of papers presenting the latest research issues from around the world

Automatic Replication of Teleoperator Head Movements and Facial Expressions on a Humanoid Robot

Robotic telepresence aims to create a physical presence for a remotely located human (teleoperator) by reproducing their verbal and nonverbal behaviours (e.g. speech, gestures, facial expressions) on a robotic platform. In this work, we propose a novel teleoperation system that combines the replication of facial expressions of emotions (neutral, disgust, happiness, and surprise) and head movements on the fly on the humanoid robot Nao. Robots' expression of emotions is constrained by their physical and behavioural capabilities. As the Nao robot has a static face, we use the LEDs located around its eyes to reproduce the teleoperator expressions of emotions. Using a web camera, we computationally detect the facial action units and measure the head pose of the operator. The emotion to be replicated is inferred from the detected action units by a neural network. Simultaneously, the measured head motion is smoothed and bounded to the robot's physical limits by applying a constrained-state Kalman filter. In order to evaluate the proposed system, we conducted a user study by asking 28 participants to use the replication system by displaying facial expressions and head movements while being recorded by a web camera. Subsequently, 18 external observers viewed the recorded clips via an online survey and assessed the quality of the robot's replication of the participants' behaviours. Our results show that the proposed teleoperation system can successfully communicate emotions and head movements, resulting in a high agreement among the external observers (ICC_E = 0.91, ICC_HP = 0.72).This work was funded by the EPSRC under its IDEAS Factory Sandpits call on Digital Personhood (Grant Ref· EP/L00416X/1)