58,058 research outputs found
Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people
This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of
elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly
people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new
applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses
the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and
users for which service robots are and are not suitable
An Approach to Agent-Based Service Composition and Its Application to Mobile
This paper describes an architecture model for multiagent systems that was developed in the European project LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform). Its main feature is a set of generic services that are implemented independently of the agents and can be installed into the agents by the application developer in a flexible way. Moreover, two applications using this architecture model are described that were also developed within the LEAP project. The application domain is the support of mobile, virtual teams for the German automobile club ADAC and for British Telecommunications
A Distributed and Privacy-Aware Speed Advisory System for Optimising Conventional and Electric Vehicles Networks
One of the key ideas to make Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) work
effectively is to deploy advanced communication and cooperative control
technologies among the vehicles and road infrastructures. In this spirit, we
propose a consensus-based distributed speed advisory system that optimally
determines a recommended common speed for a given area in order that the group
emissions, or group battery consumptions, are minimised. Our algorithms achieve
this in a privacy-aware manner; namely, individual vehicles do not reveal
in-vehicle information to other vehicles or to infrastructure. A mobility
simulator is used to illustrate the efficacy of the algorithm, and
hardware-in-the-loop tests involving a real vehicle are given to illustrate
user acceptability and ease of the deployment.Comment: This is a journal paper based on the conference paper "Highway speed
limits, optimised consensus, and intelligent speed advisory systems"
presented at the 3rd International Conference on Connected Vehicles and Expo
(ICCVE 2014) in November 2014. This is the revised version of the paper
recently submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation
Systems for publicatio
Agent Based Test and Repair of Distributed Systems
This article demonstrates how to use intelligent agents for testing and repairing a distributed system, whose elements may or may not have embedded BIST (Built-In Self-Test) and BISR (Built-In Self-Repair) facilities. Agents are software modules that perform monitoring, diagnosis and repair of the faults. They form together a society whose members communicate, set goals and solve tasks. An experimental solution is presented, and future developments of the proposed approach are explore
Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!
This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all
A stigmergy-based analysis of city hotspots to discover trends and anomalies in urban transportation usage
A key aspect of a sustainable urban transportation system is the
effectiveness of transportation policies. To be effective, a policy has to
consider a broad range of elements, such as pollution emission, traffic flow,
and human mobility. Due to the complexity and variability of these elements in
the urban area, to produce effective policies remains a very challenging task.
With the introduction of the smart city paradigm, a widely available amount of
data can be generated in the urban spaces. Such data can be a fundamental
source of knowledge to improve policies because they can reflect the
sustainability issues underlying the city. In this context, we propose an
approach to exploit urban positioning data based on stigmergy, a bio-inspired
mechanism providing scalar and temporal aggregation of samples. By employing
stigmergy, samples in proximity with each other are aggregated into a
functional structure called trail. The trail summarizes relevant dynamics in
data and allows matching them, providing a measure of their similarity.
Moreover, this mechanism can be specialized to unfold specific dynamics.
Specifically, we identify high-density urban areas (i.e hotspots), analyze
their activity over time, and unfold anomalies. Moreover, by matching activity
patterns, a continuous measure of the dissimilarity with respect to the typical
activity pattern is provided. This measure can be used by policy makers to
evaluate the effect of policies and change them dynamically. As a case study,
we analyze taxi trip data gathered in Manhattan from 2013 to 2015.Comment: Preprin
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