A bottom-up robot architecture based on learnt behaviors driven design

Draft previo a la revisión. El artículo definitivo tiene derechos de autor.In reactive layers of robotic architectures, behaviors should learn their operation from experience, following the trends of modern intelligence theories. A Case Based Reasoning (CBR) reactive layer could allow to achieve this goal but, as complexity of behaviors increases, thecurse of dimensionality arises: a too high amount of cases in the behaviors casebases deteriorate response times so robot's reactiveness is finally too slow for a good performance. In this work we analyze this problem and propose some improvements in the traditional CBR structure and retrieval phase, at reactive level, to reduce the impact of scalability problems when facing complex behaviors design.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

A new multi-criteria optimization strategy for shared control in wheelchair assisted navigation

In todays aging society, many people require mobility assistance, that can be provided by robotized assistive wheelchairs with a certain degree of autonomy when manual control is unfeasible due to disability. Robot wheelchairs, though, are not supposed to be completely in control because lack of human intervention may lead to loss of residual capabilities and frustration. Most of these systems rely on shared control, which typically consists of swapping control from human to robot when needed. However, this means that persons never deal with situations they find difficult. We propose a new shared control approach to allow constant cooperation between humans and robots, so that assistance may be adapted to the user’s skills. Our proposal is based on the reactive navigation paradigm, where robot and human commands become different goals in a Potential Field. Our main novelty is that human and robot attractors are weighted by their respective local efficiencies at each time instant. This produces an emergent behavior that combines both inputs in an efficient, safe and smooth way and is dynamically adapted to the user’s needs. The proposed control scheme has been successfully tested at hospital Fondazione Santa Lucia (FSL) in Rome with several volunteers presenting different disabilities