ECMR’13 Special Issue

This special issue contains extended versions of the best papers from the 6th European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR). ECMR is a biennial European forum, internationally open, that allows roboticists throughout Europe to become acquainted with the latest research accomplishments and innovations in mobile robotics and mobile human–robot systems. ECMR covers most aspects of mobile robotics research and machine intelligence, including (but not limited to) the following topics: multi-sensor fusion, localization, map building, navigation, active perception, behavior-based robotics, path and task planning, learning and adaptation, robot vision, human–robot interaction, cognitive robotics, experimental evaluation and benchmarking, 3D sensing, and applications of mobile robotics in land, water, air, underground, and space.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A minimalistic approach to appearance-based visual SLAM

This paper presents a vision-based approach to SLAM in indoor / outdoor environments with minimalistic sensing and computational requirements. The approach is based on a graph representation of robot poses, using a relaxation algorithm to obtain a globally consistent map. Each link corresponds to a relative measurement of the spatial relation between the two nodes it connects. The links describe the likelihood distribution of the relative pose as a Gaussian distribution. To estimate the covariance matrix for links obtained from an omni-directional vision sensor, a novel method is introduced based on the relative similarity of neighbouring images. This new method does not require determining distances to image features using multiple view geometry, for example. Combined indoor and outdoor experiments demonstrate that the approach can handle qualitatively different environments (without modification of the parameters), that it can cope with violations of the “flat floor assumption” to some degree, and that it scales well with increasing size of the environment, producing topologically correct and geometrically accurate maps at low computational cost. Further experiments demonstrate that the approach is also suitable for combining multiple overlapping maps, e.g. for solving the multi-robot SLAM problem with unknown initial poses

Beyond Gazing, Pointing, and Reaching: A Survey of Developmental Robotics

Developmental robotics is an emerging field located at the intersection of developmental psychology and robotics, that has lately attracted quite some attention. This paper gives a survey of a variety of research projects dealing with or inspired by developmental issues, and outlines possible future directions

The roots of self-awareness

In this paper we provide an account of the structural underpinnings of self-awareness. We offer both an abstract, logical account-by way of suggestions for how to build a genuinely self-referring artificial agent-and a biological account, via a discussion of the role of somatoception in supporting and structuring self-awareness more generally. Central to the account is a discussion of the necessary motivational properties of self-representing mental tokens, in light of which we offer a novel definition of self-representation. We also discuss the role of such tokens in organizing self-specifying information, which leads to a naturalized restatement of the guarantee that introspective awareness is immune to error due to mis-identification of the subject