11,167 research outputs found
Importance and applications of robotic and autonomous systems (RAS) in railway maintenance sector: a review
Maintenance, which is critical for safe, reliable, quality, and cost-effective service, plays a dominant role in the railway industry. Therefore, this paper examines the importance and applications of Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) in railway maintenance. More than 70 research publications, which are either in practice or under investigation describing RAS developments in the railway maintenance, are analysed. It has been found that the majority of RAS developed are for rolling-stock maintenance, followed by railway track maintenance. Further, it has been found that there is growing interest and demand for robotics and autonomous systems in the railway maintenance sector, which is largely due to the increased competition, rapid expansion and ever-increasing expense
Autonomous Mechanical Assembly on the Space Shuttle: An Overview
The space shuttle will be equipped with a pair of 50 ft. manipulators used to handle payloads and to perform mechanical assembly operations. Although current plans call for these manipulators to be operated by a human teleoperator. The possibility of using results from robotics and machine intelligence to automate this shuttle assembly system was investigated. The major components of an autonomous mechanical assembly system are examined, along with the technology base upon which they depend. The state of the art in advanced automation is also assessed
An Evaluation Schema for the Ethical Use of Autonomous Robotic Systems in Security Applications
We propose a multi-step evaluation schema designed to help procurement agencies and others to examine the ethical dimensions of autonomous systems to be applied in the security sector, including autonomous weapons systems
On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces
© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the userâs acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree â to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving usersâ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe
Prioritized Planning for Target-Oriented Manipulation via Hierarchical Stacking Relationship Prediction
In scenarios involving the grasping of multiple targets, the learning of
stacking relationships between objects is fundamental for robots to execute
safely and efficiently. However, current methods lack subdivision for the
hierarchy of stacking relationship types. In scenes where objects are mostly
stacked in an orderly manner, they are incapable of performing human-like and
high-efficient grasping decisions. This paper proposes a perception-planning
method to distinguish different stacking types between objects and generate
prioritized manipulation order decisions based on given target designations. We
utilize a Hierarchical Stacking Relationship Network (HSRN) to discriminate the
hierarchy of stacking and generate a refined Stacking Relationship Tree (SRT)
for relationship description. Considering that objects with high stacking
stability can be grasped together if necessary, we introduce an elaborate
decision-making planner based on the Partially Observable Markov Decision
Process (POMDP), which leverages observations and generates the least
grasp-consuming decision chain with robustness and is suitable for
simultaneously specifying multiple targets. To verify our work, we set the
scene to the dining table and augment the REGRAD dataset with a set of common
tableware models for network training. Experiments show that our method
effectively generates grasping decisions that conform to human requirements,
and improves the implementation efficiency compared with existing methods on
the basis of guaranteeing the success rate.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure
- âŠ