Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends and Applications

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue entitled “Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends, and Applications” that was published in Applied Sciences. This Special Issue collected seventeen high-quality papers that discuss the main challenges of multi-robot systems, present the trends to address these issues, and report various relevant applications. Some of the topics addressed by these papers are robot swarms, mission planning, robot teaming, machine learning, immersive technologies, search and rescue, and social robotics

Climbing and Walking Robots

Nowadays robotics is one of the most dynamic fields of scientific researches. The shift of robotics researches from manufacturing to services applications is clear. During the last decades interest in studying climbing and walking robots has been increased. This increasing interest has been in many areas that most important ones of them are: mechanics, electronics, medical engineering, cybernetics, controls, and computers. Today’s climbing and walking robots are a combination of manipulative, perceptive, communicative, and cognitive abilities and they are capable of performing many tasks in industrial and non- industrial environments. Surveillance, planetary exploration, emergence rescue operations, reconnaissance, petrochemical applications, construction, entertainment, personal services, intervention in severe environments, transportation, medical and etc are some applications from a very diverse application fields of climbing and walking robots. By great progress in this area of robotics it is anticipated that next generation climbing and walking robots will enhance lives and will change the way the human works, thinks and makes decisions. This book presents the state of the art achievments, recent developments, applications and future challenges of climbing and walking robots. These are presented in 24 chapters by authors throughtot the world The book serves as a reference especially for the researchers who are interested in mobile robots. It also is useful for industrial engineers and graduate students in advanced study

Peripersonal Space in the Humanoid Robot iCub

Developing behaviours for interaction with objects close to the body is a primary goal for any organism to survive in the world. Being able to develop such behaviours will be an essential feature in autonomous humanoid robots in order to improve their integration into human environments. Adaptable spatial abilities will make robots safer and improve their social skills, human-robot and robot-robot collaboration abilities. This work investigated how a humanoid robot can explore and create action-based representations of its peripersonal space, the region immediately surrounding the body where reaching is possible without location displacement. It presents three empirical studies based on peripersonal space findings from psychology, neuroscience and robotics. The experiments used a visual perception system based on active-vision and biologically inspired neural networks. The first study investigated the contribution of binocular vision in a reaching task. Results indicated the signal from vergence is a useful embodied depth estimation cue in the peripersonal space in humanoid robots. The second study explored the influence of morphology and postural experience on confidence levels in reaching assessment. Results showed that a decrease of confidence when assessing targets located farther from the body, possibly in accordance to errors in depth estimation from vergence for longer distances. Additionally, it was found that a proprioceptive arm-length signal extends the robot’s peripersonal space. The last experiment modelled development of the reaching skill by implementing motor synergies that progressively unlock degrees of freedom in the arm. The model was advantageous when compared to one that included no developmental stages. The contribution to knowledge of this work is extending the research on biologically-inspired methods for building robots, presenting new ways to further investigate the robotic properties involved in the dynamical adaptation to body and sensing characteristics, vision-based action, morphology and confidence levels in reaching assessment.CONACyT, Mexico (National Council of Science and Technology

Cellulo: Tangible Haptic Swarm Robots for Learning

Robots are steadily becoming one of the significant 21st century learning technologies that aim to improve education within both formal and informal environments. Such robots, called Robots for Learning, have so far been utilized as constructionist tools or social agents that aided learning from distinct perspectives. This thesis presents a novel approach to Robots for Learning that aims to explore new added values by means of investigating uses for robots in educational scenarios beyond those that are commonly tackled: We develop a platform from scratch to be "as versatile as pen and paper", namely as composed of easy to use objects that feel like they belong in the learning ecosystem while being seamlessly usable across many activities that help teach a variety of subjects. Following this analogy, we design our platform as many low-cost, palm-sized tangible robots that operate on printed paper sheets, controlled by readily available mobile computers such as smartphones or tablets. From the learners' perspective, our robots are thus physical and manipulable points of hands-on interaction with learning activities where they play the role of both abstract and concrete objects that are otherwise not easily represented. We realize our novel platform in four incremental phases, each of which consists of a development stage and multiple subsequent validation stages. First, we develop accurately positioned tangibles, characterize their localization performance and test the learners' interaction with our tangibles in a playful activity. Second, we integrate mobility into our tangibles and make them full-blown robots, characterize their locomotion performance and test the emerging notion of moving vs. being moved in a learning activity. Third, we enable haptic feedback capability on our robots, measure their range of usability and test them within a complete lesson that highlights this newly developed affordance. Fourth, we develop the means of building swarms with our haptic-enabled tangible robots and test the final form of our platform in a lesson co-designed with a teacher. Our effort thus contains the participation of more than 370 child learners over the span of these phases, which leads to the initial insights into this novel Robots for Learning avenue. Besides its main contributions to education, this thesis further contributes to a range of research fields related to our technological developments, such as positioning systems, robotic mechanism design, haptic interfaces and swarm robotics

Multi-Agent Systems

This Special Issue ""Multi-Agent Systems"" gathers original research articles reporting results on the steadily growing area of agent-oriented computing and multi-agent systems technologies. After more than 20 years of academic research on multi-agent systems (MASs), in fact, agent-oriented models and technologies have been promoted as the most suitable candidates for the design and development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and dynamic environments. With respect to both their quality and range, the papers in this Special Issue already represent a meaningful sample of the most recent advancements in the field of agent-oriented models and technologies. In particular, the 17 contributions cover agent-based modeling and simulation, situated multi-agent systems, socio-technical multi-agent systems, and semantic technologies applied to multi-agent systems. In fact, it is surprising to witness how such a limited portion of MAS research already highlights the most relevant usage of agent-based models and technologies, as well as their most appreciated characteristics. We are thus confident that the readers of Applied Sciences will be able to appreciate the growing role that MASs will play in the design and development of the next generation of complex intelligent systems. This Special Issue has been converted into a yearly series, for which a new call for papers is already available at the Applied Sciences journal’s website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/special_issues/Multi-Agent_Systems_2019

Proceedings of the 9th international conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies (ICDVRAT 2012)

The proceedings of the conferenc

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topical sections on haptic science, haptic technology, and haptic applications. This year's focus is on accessibility

Third International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation for Space 1994

The Third International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation for Space (i-SAIRAS 94), held October 18-20, 1994, in Pasadena, California, was jointly sponsored by NASA, ESA, and Japan's National Space Development Agency, and was hosted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology. i-SAIRAS 94 featured presentations covering a variety of technical and programmatic topics, ranging from underlying basic technology to specific applications of artificial intelligence and robotics to space missions. i-SAIRAS 94 featured a special workshop on planning and scheduling and provided scientists, engineers, and managers with the opportunity to exchange theoretical ideas, practical results, and program plans in such areas as space mission control, space vehicle processing, data analysis, autonomous spacecraft, space robots and rovers, satellite servicing, and intelligent instruments

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topical sections on haptic science, haptic technology, and haptic applications. This year's focus is on accessibility