17,200 research outputs found
Overview of technologies for building robots in the classroom
This paper aims to give an overview of technologies that can be used to implement robotics within an educational context. We discuss complete robotics systems as well as projects that implement only certain elements of a robotics system, such as electronics, hardware, or software. We believe that Maker Movement and DIY trends offers many new opportunities for teaching and feel that they will become much more prominent in the future. Products and projects discussed in this paper are: Mindstorms, Vex, Arduino, Dwengo, Raspberry Pi, MakeBlock, OpenBeam, BitBeam, Scratch, Blockly and ArduBlock
Middleware platform for distributed applications incorporating robots, sensors and the cloud
Cyber-physical systems in the factory of the future
will consist of cloud-hosted software governing an agile
production process executed by autonomous mobile robots
and controlled by analyzing the data from a vast number of
sensors. CPSs thus operate on a distributed production floor
infrastructure and the set-up continuously changes with each
new manufacturing task. In this paper, we present our OSGibased
middleware that abstracts the deployment of servicebased
CPS software components on the underlying distributed
platform comprising robots, actuators, sensors and the cloud.
Moreover, our middleware provides specific support to develop
components based on artificial neural networks, a technique that
recently became very popular for sensor data analytics and robot
actuation. We demonstrate a system where a robot takes actions
based on the input from sensors in its vicinity
Decentralized Control of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes using Belief Space Macro-actions
The focus of this paper is on solving multi-robot planning problems in
continuous spaces with partial observability. Decentralized partially
observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) are general models for
multi-robot coordination problems, but representing and solving Dec-POMDPs is
often intractable for large problems. To allow for a high-level representation
that is natural for multi-robot problems and scalable to large discrete and
continuous problems, this paper extends the Dec-POMDP model to the
decentralized partially observable semi-Markov decision process (Dec-POSMDP).
The Dec-POSMDP formulation allows asynchronous decision-making by the robots,
which is crucial in multi-robot domains. We also present an algorithm for
solving this Dec-POSMDP which is much more scalable than previous methods since
it can incorporate closed-loop belief space macro-actions in planning. These
macro-actions are automatically constructed to produce robust solutions. The
proposed method's performance is evaluated on a complex multi-robot package
delivery problem under uncertainty, showing that our approach can naturally
represent multi-robot problems and provide high-quality solutions for
large-scale problems
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