Interactions between Art and Mobile Robotic System Engineering

The field of mobile robotics offers a new medium for public entertainment and art. Mobile robots can move, react, and interact in the real world, generating behaviors that can be used as a new artistic medium quite different from sculptures, drawings or video. This new medium, like other technological media such as video or the Internet, requires considerable technical know-how to be exploited successfully. The successful design of a mobile robot demands a strong interdisciplinary and systems-oriented engineering process. The addition of artistic constraints adds a new dimension to the engineering problem and reinforces the need for a coherent approach to the design. This paper illustrates this interdisciplinary approach with six examples of robotic art and entertainment projects that demonstrate the methodological issues needed for this type of work. Several aspects of the projects are discussed, including the artistic effects on the public, the sometimes problematic interaction between artists and engineers, and details of the mechanical, electronic and behavioral designs as applied to entertainment

KhepOnTheWeb: open access to a mobile robot on the Internet

For years research has focused on ways to allow remote access via standard communication networks to unique or expensive structures. With the growth of the Internet, one finds more and more devices connected to it. Despite the fact that one may spy on other people with hundreds of cameras, it is currently possible to interact only with a few robots, which often have restricted access. To use a camera over the web, the user usually just sits and watches or sometimes has the ability to choose different camera orientation/views. With a robot, you have strong interaction. For instance, with a mobile robot equipped with an arm you can move along the floor and grasp objects. Discovering the control interface, the user has to understand rapidly the goal of the site and what the possibilities of the robot are in order to achieve them. The article analyses one year of netsurfer behavior regarding the use of KhepOnTheWeb, which was realized to demonstrate some possibilities of remote control of a Khepera mobile robot. After one year of access, we performed an analysis of the log files in order to understand the behavior of the public facing such an installation. This analysis was rather difficult because of the large amount of data involved, and specific software was developed in order to extract and present the relevant information. The goal of the project is presented, the hardware and software components of our robot installation are described, and the analysis of the web server log files is discussed. We also introduce another concept of a remote-controlled robot on the we

Evolution of neural control structures: Some experiments on mobile robots

From perception to action and form action to perception, all elements of an autonomous agent are interdependent and need to be strongly coherent. The final behavior of the agent is the result of the global activity of this loop and every weakness of incoherence of a single element has strong consequences on the performances of the agent. We think that, for the purpose of building autonomous robots, all these elements need to be developed together in continuous interaction with the environment. We describe the implementation of a possible solution (artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms) on a real mobile robot through a set of three different experiments. We focus our attention on three different aspects of the control structure: perception, internal representation and action. In all the experiments these aspects are not considered as single processing elements, but as part of an agent. For every experiment, the advantages and disadvantages of this approach are presented and discussed. The results show that the combination of genetic algorithms and neural networks is a very interesting technique for the development of control structures in autonomous agents. The time necessary for evolution, on the other hand, is very important limitation of the evolutionary approach

Evolution of Homing Navigation in a Real Mobile Robot

In this paper we describe the evolution of a discrete-time recurrent neural network to control a real mobile robot. In all our experiments the evolutionary procedure is carried out entirely on the physical robot without human intervention. We show that the autonomous development of a set of behaviors for locating a battery charger and periodically returning to it can be achieved by lifting constraints in the design of the robot/environment interactions that were employed in a preliminary experiment. The emergent homing behavior is based on the autonomous development of an internal neural topographic map (which is not pre-designed) that allows the robot to choose the appropriate trajectory as function of location and remaining energy

Evolutionary Neurocontrollers for Autonomous Mobile Robots

In this article we describe a methodology for evolving neurocontrollers of autonomous mobile robots without human intervention. The presentation, which spans from technological and methodological issues to several experimental results on evolution of physical mobile robots, covers both previous and recent work in the attempt to provide a unified picture within which the reader can compare the effects of systematic variations on the experimental settings. After describing some key principles for building mobile robots and tools suitable for experiments in adaptive robotics, we give an overview of different approaches to evolutionary robotics and present our methodology. We start reviewing two basic experiments showing that different environments can shape very different behaviors and neural mechanisms under very similar selection criteria. We then address the issue of incremental evolution in two different experiments from the perspective of changing environments and robot morphologies. Finally, we investigate the possibility of evolving plastic neurocontrollers and analyze and evolved neurocontroller that relies on fast and continuously changes synapses characterized by dynamic stability. We conclude by reviewing the implications of this methodology for engineering, biology, cognitive science, and artificial life, and point at future directions of research

Active Perception, Navigation, Homing, and Grasping: An autonomous Perspective

Perception is needed for action, not for the pure sake of the construction of abstract representations, although it does not exclude the role of internal representations for mediating complex behaviors. We think that, for the purpose of building autonomous robots, active perception requires specific recipes for three related aspects: the design of the physical sensory system, the modality and type of information extracted, and the structure and functioning of the control system. We outline a set of solutions for these three aspects and describe their implementation on a real mobile robot through a set of three different experiments using a combination of neural networks and genetic algorithms. The results show that active perception is a useful feature that is exploited by autonomous agents. The experiments show that the combination of genetic algorithms and neural networks is a feasible and fruitful technique for the development of active perception in autonomous agents

Modelling and analyzing adaptive self-assembling strategies with Maude

Building adaptive systems with predictable emergent behavior is a challenging task and it is becoming a critical need. The research community has accepted the challenge by introducing approaches of various nature: from software architectures, to programming paradigms, to analysis techniques. We recently proposed a conceptual framework for adaptation centered around the role of control data. In this paper we show that it can be naturally realized in a reflective logical language like Maude by using the Reflective Russian Dolls model. Moreover, we exploit this model to specify and analyse a prominent example of adaptive system: robot swarms equipped with obstacle-avoidance self-assembly strategies. The analysis exploits the statistical model checker PVesta

The Development of Khepera

This short paper explains how the Khepera robot was developed, from the initial idea to the its commercialisation by K-Team. The goal of this paper is not a scientific analysis but an historical overview of the steps made in the development of this robot since 1991. The papers introduces first the situation of the team who started the development, then decisions made in creating the actual Khepera are briefly described, as well as some important steps in the commercialisation of the robot. We conclude with the current status of Khepera, and introduce other products that have evolved from Khepera