AltURI: a thin middleware for simulated robot vision applications

Fast software performance is often the focus when developing real-time vision-based control applications for robot simulators. In this paper we have developed a thin, high performance middleware for USARSim and other simulators designed for real-time vision-based control applications. It includes a fast image server providing images in OpenCV, Matlab or web formats and a simple command/sensor processor. The interface has been tested in USARSim with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle using two control applications; landing using a reinforcement learning algorithm and altitude control using elementary motion detection. The middleware has been found to be fast enough to control the flying robot as well as very easy to set up and use

An Open-Source Simulator for Cognitive Robotics Research: The Prototype of the iCub Humanoid Robot Simulator

This paper presents the prototype of a new computer simulator for the humanoid robot iCub. The iCub is a new open-source humanoid robot developed as a result of the “RobotCub” project, a collaborative European project aiming at developing a new open-source cognitive robotics platform. The iCub simulator has been developed as part of a joint effort with the European project “ITALK” on the integration and transfer of action and language knowledge in cognitive robots. This is available open-source to all researchers interested in cognitive robotics experiments with the iCub humanoid platform

Realistic simulation of spatial computers and robot swarms

The goal of Amorphous Computing is defined as: “To identify organizational principles and create programming technologies for obtaining intentional, pre-specified behavior from the cooperation of myriad unreliable parts that are arranged in unknown, irregular, and time-varying ways” [1]. Amorphous Facades are stationary formations of amorphous computers used in building environments and are constructed as a wall. One of the desired functionalities of the Amorphous walls is to be able to track occupancy within an interior environment. Pymorphous is a spatial computing library for Python. Currently, Pymorphous has its own simulator, but the simulator is very abstract and doesn\u27t realistically simulate physical robots or device hardware limitations. Webots is a virtual robot simulation program that is much less abstract that the Pymorphous simulator and that accurately simulates physics and realistic hardware. The simulator-runtime for Pymorphous is very specific to its own simulator. To allow Pymorphous to be simulated in a less abstract environment, Webots, I will create a new runtime which will facilitate communication between amorphous computing robots within Webots and Pymorphous. To demonstrate the functionality of the Webots-runtime for Pymorphous, I will develop three simulations within Webots. A simple neighborhood simulation will be used to show the functionality of Pymorphous neighborhood calculation between amorphous wall panels in Webots. A velocity tracking simulation will be used to demonstrate the functionality of simple tracking algorithms within Webots, similar to algorithms that the wall might actually use to track occupancy. Lastly, the setup of the Amorphous Wall within Webots will be changed to reflect mobile robots to illustrate the ability of Webots to simulate more complex Pymorphous flocking algorithms on mobile robots

Platform Relative Sensor Abstractions across Mobile Robots using Computer Vision and Sensor Integration

Uniform sensor management and abstraction across different robot platforms is a difficult task due to the sheer diversity of sensing devices. However, because these sensors can be grouped into categories that in essence provide the same information, we can capture their similarities and create abstractions. An example would be distance data measured by an assortment of range sensors, or alternatively extracted from a camera using image processing. This paper describes how using software components it is possible to uniformly construct high-level abstractions of sensor information across various robots in a way to support the portability of common code that uses these abstractions (e.g. obstacle avoidance, wall following). We demonstrate our abstractions on a number of robots using different configurations of range sensors and cameras

Topological Navigation of Simulated Robots using Occupancy Grid

Formerly I presented a metric navigation method in the Webots mobile robot simulator. The navigating Khepera-like robot builds an occupancy grid of the environment and explores the square-shaped room around with a value iteration algorithm. Now I created a topological navigation procedure based on the occupancy grid process. The extension by a skeletonization algorithm results a graph of important places and the connecting routes among them. I also show the significant time profit gained during the process

KRolog: A Prolog based interface for the Khepera robots

In this paper we present KRolog a Prolog based interface to work with simulated and real Khepera robots. The interface hides low-level robot-computer communication and provides a high-order set of predicates to develop programs in a declarative manner. This paper describes the software we have developed to support the hardware platform we use in cognitive robotics research at the LIDIC.Eje: Agentes y Sistemas InteligentesRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

An Artificial Synaptic Plasticity Mechanism for Classical Conditioning with Neural Networks

We present an artificial synaptic plasticity (ASP) mechanism that allows artificial systems to make associations between environmental stimuli and learn new skills at runtime. ASP builds on the classical neural network for simulating associative learning, which is induced through a conditioning-like procedure. Experiments in a simulated mobile robot demonstrate that ASP has successfully generated conditioned responses. The robot has learned during environmental exploration to use sensors added after training, improving its object-avoidance capabilities