27,793 research outputs found
Managing a Fleet of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) using Cloud Robotics Platform
In this paper, we provide details of implementing a system for managing a
fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) operating in a factory or a warehouse
premise. While the robots are themselves autonomous in its motion and obstacle
avoidance capability, the target destination for each robot is provided by a
global planner. The global planner and the ground vehicles (robots) constitute
a multi agent system (MAS) which communicate with each other over a wireless
network. Three different approaches are explored for implementation. The first
two approaches make use of the distributed computing based Networked Robotics
architecture and communication framework of Robot Operating System (ROS) itself
while the third approach uses Rapyuta Cloud Robotics framework for this
implementation. The comparative performance of these approaches are analyzed
through simulation as well as real world experiment with actual robots. These
analyses provide an in-depth understanding of the inner working of the Cloud
Robotics Platform in contrast to the usual ROS framework. The insight gained
through this exercise will be valuable for students as well as practicing
engineers interested in implementing similar systems else where. In the
process, we also identify few critical limitations of the current Rapyuta
platform and provide suggestions to overcome them.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures, journal pape
Context Aware Adaptable Applications - A global approach
Actual applications (mostly component based) requirements cannot be expressed without a ubiquitous and mobile part for end-users as well as for M2M applications (Machine to Machine). Such an evolution implies context management in order to evaluate the consequences of the mobility and corresponding mechanisms to adapt or to be adapted to the new environment. Applications are then qualified as context aware applications. This first part of this paper presents an overview of context and its management by application adaptation. This part starts by a definition and proposes a model for the context. It also presents various techniques to adapt applications to the context: from self-adaptation to supervised approached. The second part is an overview of architectures for adaptable applications. It focuses on platforms based solutions and shows information flows between application, platform and context. Finally it makes a synthesis proposition with a platform for adaptable context-aware applications called Kalimucho. Then we present implementations tools for software components and a dataflow models in order to implement the Kalimucho platform
Virtual Borders: Accurate Definition of a Mobile Robot's Workspace Using Augmented Reality
We address the problem of interactively controlling the workspace of a mobile
robot to ensure a human-aware navigation. This is especially of relevance for
non-expert users living in human-robot shared spaces, e.g. home environments,
since they want to keep the control of their mobile robots, such as vacuum
cleaning or companion robots. Therefore, we introduce virtual borders that are
respected by a robot while performing its tasks. For this purpose, we employ a
RGB-D Google Tango tablet as human-robot interface in combination with an
augmented reality application to flexibly define virtual borders. We evaluated
our system with 15 non-expert users concerning accuracy, teaching time and
correctness and compared the results with other baseline methods based on
visual markers and a laser pointer. The experimental results show that our
method features an equally high accuracy while reducing the teaching time
significantly compared to the baseline methods. This holds for different border
lengths, shapes and variations in the teaching process. Finally, we
demonstrated the correctness of the approach, i.e. the mobile robot changes its
navigational behavior according to the user-defined virtual borders.Comment: Accepted on 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS), supplementary video: https://youtu.be/oQO8sQ0JBR
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
This Far, No Further: Introducing Virtual Borders to Mobile Robots Using a Laser Pointer
We address the problem of controlling the workspace of a 3-DoF mobile robot.
In a human-robot shared space, robots should navigate in a human-acceptable way
according to the users' demands. For this purpose, we employ virtual borders,
that are non-physical borders, to allow a user the restriction of the robot's
workspace. To this end, we propose an interaction method based on a laser
pointer to intuitively define virtual borders. This interaction method uses a
previously developed framework based on robot guidance to change the robot's
navigational behavior. Furthermore, we extend this framework to increase the
flexibility by considering different types of virtual borders, i.e. polygons
and curves separating an area. We evaluated our method with 15 non-expert users
concerning correctness, accuracy and teaching time. The experimental results
revealed a high accuracy and linear teaching time with respect to the border
length while correctly incorporating the borders into the robot's navigational
map. Finally, our user study showed that non-expert users can employ our
interaction method.Comment: Accepted at 2019 Third IEEE International Conference on Robotic
Computing (IRC), supplementary video: https://youtu.be/lKsGp8xtyI
Applying Cross-cultural theory to understand usersâ preferences on interactive information retrieval platform design
Presented at EuroHCIR 2014, the 4th European Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, 13th September 2014, at BCS London Office, Covent Garden, London.In this paper we look at using culture to group users and model the usersâ preference on cross cultural information retrieval, in order to investigate the relationship between the user search preferences and the userâs cultural background. Initially we review and discuss briefly website localisation. We continue by examining culture and Hofstedeâs cultural dimensions. We identified a link between Hofstedeâs five dimensions and user experience. We did an analogy for each of the five dimensions and developed six hypotheses from the analogies. These hypotheses were then tested by means of a user study. Whilst the key findings from the study suggest cross cultural theory can be used to model userâs preferences for information retrieval, further work still needs to be done on how cultural dimensions can be applied to inform the search interface design
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