Acting and being aware

One often assumes that we, rational human beings, first think and than act. This paper is an attempt to describe the mental characteristics governing the performance of regular everyday actions; and shows that no mental act has to precede our actions, instead of consciously thinking before we act, we mostly act while simultaneously overseeing our acting. The case of ball juggling is used to underpin the analysis with practical facts

Robot swarming applications

This paper discusses the different modes of operation of a swarm of robots: (i) non-communicative swarming, (ii) communicative swarming, (iii) networking, (iv) olfactory-based navigation and (v) assistive swarming. I briefly present the state of the art in swarming and outline the major techniques applied for each mode of operation and discuss the related problems and expected results

Viewfinder: final activity report

The VIEW-FINDER project (2006-2009) is an 'Advanced Robotics' project that seeks to apply a semi-autonomous robotic system to inspect ground safety in the event of a fire. Its primary aim is to gather data (visual and chemical) in order to assist rescue personnel. A base station combines the gathered information with information retrieved from off-site sources. The project addresses key issues related to map building and reconstruction, interfacing local command information with external sources, human-robot interfaces and semi-autonomous robot navigation. The VIEW-FINDER system is a semi-autonomous; the individual robot-sensors operate autonomously within the limits of the task assigned to them, that is, they will autonomously navigate through and inspect an area. Human operators monitor their operations and send high level task requests as well as low level commands through the interface to any nodes in the entire system. The human interface has to ensure the human supervisor and human interveners are provided a reduced but good and relevant overview of the ground and the robots and human rescue workers therein

GUARDIANS final report

Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for firefghters. The large dimensions together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The Guardians robot swarm is designed to assist fire fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this report we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots searching and assisting fire fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms which provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also one of the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus the robot swarm is able to locate itself and provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the re ghters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm based information to human beings

Emerging robot swarm traffic

We discuss traffic patterns generated by swarms of robots while commuting to and from a base station. The overall question is whether to explicitly organise the traffic or whether a certain regularity develops `naturally'. Human driven motorized traffic is rigidly structured in two lanes. However, army ants develop a three-lane pattern in their traffic, while human pedestrians generate a main trail and secondary trials in either direction. Our robot swarm approach is bottom-up: designing individual agents we first investigate the mathematics of cases occurring when applying the artificial potential field method to three 'perfect' robots. We show that traffic lane pattern will not be disturbed by the internal system of forces. Next, we define models of sensor designs to account for the practical fact that robots (and ants) have limited visibility and compare the sensor models in groups of three robots. In the final step we define layouts of a highway: an unbounded open space, a trail with surpassable edges and a hard defined (walled) highway. Having defined the preliminaries we run swarm simulations and look for emerging traffic patterns. Apparently, depending on the initial situation a variety of lane patterns occurs, however, high traffic densities do delay the emergence of traffic lanes considerably. Overall we conclude that regularities do emerge naturally and can be turned into an advantage to obtain efficient robot traffic

Exploring haptic interfacing with a mobile robot without visual feedback

Search and rescue scenarios are often complicated by low or no visibility conditions. The lack of visual feedback hampers orientation and causes significant stress for human rescue workers. The Guardians project [1] pioneered a group of autonomous mobile robots assisting a human rescue worker operating within close range. Trials were held with fire fighters of South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue. It became clear that the subjects by no means were prepared to give up their procedural routine and the feel of security they provide: they simply ignored instructions that contradicted their routines

The rise of the robots

The current paper is an extract from the paper Robotics Horizon. The paper is aimed at a general public to inform about current developments in robotics in the UK

Experiments in cooperative human multi-robot navigation

In this paper, we consider the problem of a group of autonomous mobile robots and a human moving coordinately in a real-world implementation. The group moves throughout a dynamic and unstructured environment. The key problem to be solved is the inclusion of a human in a real multi-robot system and consequently the multiple robot motion coordination. We present a set of performance metrics (system efficiency and percentage of time in formation) and a novel flexible formation definition whereby a formation control strategy both in simulation and in real-world experiments of a human multi-robot system is presented. The formation control proposed is stable and effective by means of its uniform dispersion, cohesion and flexibility

Robotics Horizon

The Rt Hon David Willets, minister for Universities and Science identified the importance of Robotics and Autonomous Systems as a general technology: 'Robots acting independently of human control - which can learn, adapt and take decisions - will revolutionise our economy and society over the next 20 years' (Willetts 2013). The current report has the focus on the societal aspect of this revolution and briefly sets out the landscape of current and future robotic systems applied in everyday human life and offers a brief overview of what robotics currently is and might be about in the future. The report includes contributions from across the UK robotics community (though completeness is not claimed).The emphasis is on the application of robots operating in the vicinity of human beings that can learn, adapt and take decisions. However, the underlying enabling technologies such as machine vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence are not discussed separately

Multi-robot team formation control in the GUARDIANS project

Purpose The GUARDIANS multi-robot team is to be deployed in a large warehouse in smoke. The team is to assist firefighters search the warehouse in the event or danger of a fire. The large dimensions of the environment together with development of smoke which drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges for search and rescue operations. The GUARDIANS robots guide and accompany the firefighters on site whilst indicating possible obstacles and the locations of danger and maintaining communications links. Design/methodology/approach In order to fulfill the aforementioned tasks the robots need to exhibit certain behaviours. Among the basic behaviours are capabilities to stay together as a group, that is, generate a formation and navigate while keeping this formation. The control model used to generate these behaviours is based on the so-called social potential field framework, which we adapt to the specific tasks required for the GUARDIANS scenario. All tasks can be achieved without central control, and some of the behaviours can be performed without explicit communication between the robots. Findings The GUARDIANS environment requires flexible formations of the robot team: the formation has to adapt itself to the circumstances. Thus the application has forced us to redefine the concept of a formation. Using the graph-theoretic terminology, we can say that a formation may be stretched out as a path or be compact as a star or wheel. We have implemented the developed behaviours in simulation environments as well as on real ERA-MOBI robots commonly referred to as Erratics. We discuss advantages and shortcomings of our model, based on the simulations as well as on the implementation with a team of Erratics.</p