32,386 research outputs found
Robot Autonomy for Surgery
Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot
operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are
several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing
precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of
biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and
execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and
sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical
teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in
interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In
this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in
research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous
surgical robots
Roborobo! a Fast Robot Simulator for Swarm and Collective Robotics
Roborobo! is a multi-platform, highly portable, robot simulator for
large-scale collective robotics experiments. Roborobo! is coded in C++, and
follows the KISS guideline ("Keep it simple"). Therefore, its external
dependency is solely limited to the widely available SDL library for fast 2D
Graphics. Roborobo! is based on a Khepera/ePuck model. It is targeted for fast
single and multi-robots simulation, and has already been used in more than a
dozen published research mainly concerned with evolutionary swarm robotics,
including environment-driven self-adaptation and distributed evolutionary
optimization, as well as online onboard embodied evolution and embodied
morphogenesis.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figur
Embodied Evolution in Collective Robotics: A Review
This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied
to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied
evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough
description of the underlying concepts and mechanisms. The paper also presents
a comprehensive summary of research published in the field since its inception
(1999-2017), providing various perspectives to identify the major trends. In
particular, we identify a shift from considering embodied evolution as a
parallel search method within small robot collectives (fewer than 10 robots) to
embodied evolution as an on-line distributed learning method for designing
collective behaviours in swarm-like collectives. The paper concludes with a
discussion of applications and open questions, providing a milestone for past
and an inspiration for future research.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl
A macroscopic analytical model of collaboration in distributed robotic systems
In this article, we present a macroscopic analytical model of collaboration in a group of reactive robots. The model consists of a series of coupled differential equations that describe the dynamics of group behavior. After presenting the general model, we analyze in detail a case study of collaboration, the stick-pulling experiment, studied experimentally and in simulation by Ijspeert et al. [Autonomous Robots, 11, 149-171]. The robots' task is to pull sticks out of their holes, and it can be successfully achieved only through the collaboration of two robots. There is no explicit communication or coordination between the robots. Unlike microscopic simulations (sensor-based or using a probabilistic numerical model), in which computational time scales with the robot group size, the macroscopic model is computationally efficient, because its solutions are independent of robot group size. Analysis reproduces several qualitative conclusions of Ijspeert et al.: namely, the different dynamical regimes for different values of the ratio of robots to sticks, the existence of optimal control parameters that maximize system performance as a function of group size, and the transition from superlinear to sublinear performance as the number of robots is increased
Addressing Appearance Change in Outdoor Robotics with Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Appearance changes due to weather and seasonal conditions represent a strong
impediment to the robust implementation of machine learning systems in outdoor
robotics. While supervised learning optimises a model for the training domain,
it will deliver degraded performance in application domains that underlie
distributional shifts caused by these changes. Traditionally, this problem has
been addressed via the collection of labelled data in multiple domains or by
imposing priors on the type of shift between both domains. We frame the problem
in the context of unsupervised domain adaptation and develop a framework for
applying adversarial techniques to adapt popular, state-of-the-art network
architectures with the additional objective to align features across domains.
Moreover, as adversarial training is notoriously unstable, we first perform an
extensive ablation study, adapting many techniques known to stabilise
generative adversarial networks, and evaluate on a surrogate classification
task with the same appearance change. The distilled insights are applied to the
problem of free-space segmentation for motion planning in autonomous driving.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017
The Contribution of Society to the Construction of Individual Intelligence
It is argued that society is a crucial factor in the construction of individual intelligence. In other words that it is important that intelligence is socially situated in an analogous way to the physical situation of robots. Evidence that this may be the case is taken from developmental linguistics, the social intelligence hypothesis, the complexity of society, the need for self-reflection and autism. The consequences for the development of artificial social agents is briefly considered. Finally some challenges for research into socially situated intelligence are highlighted
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