Can We Have Cultural Robotics Without Emotions?

As robots begin to operate in environments hitherto only occupied by humans, it has become common to introduce social and cultural thinking into robotics research. Starting from the conceptualisation of culture as an emergent property of participatory processes of sense-making, in this paper we argue that cultural robotics cannot be achieved without emotions. To defend this thesis, we will first justify our working concepts, then provide our argument along with clarificatory examples. We also point to limitations of the current state-of-the-art in realising an “emotional robot” required in cultural robotics, and finally, set out a roadmap for robotics research into emotion and culture

Combining task and motion planning:challenges and guidelines

Combined Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) is an area where no one-fits-all solution can exist. Many aspects of the domain, as well as operational requirements, have an effect on how algorithms and representations are designed. Frequently, trade-offs have to be made to build a system that is effective. We propose five research questions that we believe need to be answered to solve real-world problems that involve combined TAMP. We show which decisions and trade-offs should be made with respect to these research questions, and illustrate these on examples of existing application domains. By doing so, this article aims to provide a guideline for designing combined TAMP solutions that are adequate and effective in the target scenario

Formal Modelling for Multi-Robot Systems Under Uncertainty

Purpose of Review: To effectively synthesise and analyse multi-robot behaviour, we require formal task-level models which accurately capture multi-robot execution. In this paper, we review modelling formalisms for multi-robot systems under uncertainty, and discuss how they can be used for planning, reinforcement learning, model checking, and simulation. Recent Findings: Recent work has investigated models which more accurately capture multi-robot execution by considering different forms of uncertainty, such as temporal uncertainty and partial observability, and modelling the effects of robot interactions on action execution. Other strands of work have presented approaches for reducing the size of multi-robot models to admit more efficient solution methods. This can be achieved by decoupling the robots under independence assumptions, or reasoning over higher level macro actions. Summary: Existing multi-robot models demonstrate a trade off between accurately capturing robot dependencies and uncertainty, and being small enough to tractably solve real world problems. Therefore, future research should exploit realistic assumptions over multi-robot behaviour to develop smaller models which retain accurate representations of uncertainty and robot interactions; and exploit the structure of multi-robot problems, such as factored state spaces, to develop scalable solution methods.Comment: 23 pages, 0 figures, 2 tables. Current Robotics Reports (2023). This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review (when applicable) but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s43154-023-00104-

A Constraint Programming Approach to Simultaneous Task Allocation and Motion Scheduling for Industrial Dual-Arm Manipulation Tasks

Modern lightweight dual-arm robots bring the physical capabilities to quickly take over tasks at typical industrial workplaces designed for workers. In times of mass-customization, low setup times including the instructing/specifying of new tasks are crucial to stay competitive. We propose a constraint programming approach to simultaneous task allocation and motion scheduling for such industrial manipulation and assembly tasks. The proposed approach covers dual-arm and even multi-arm robots as well as connected machines. The key concept are Ordered Visiting Constraints, a descriptive and extensible model to specify such tasks with their spatiotemporal requirements and task-specific combinatorial or ordering constraints. Our solver integrates such task models and robot motion models into constraint optimization problems and solves them efficiently using various heuristics to produce makespan-optimized robot programs. The proposed task model is robot independent and thus can easily be deployed to other robotic platforms. Flexibility and portability of our proposed model is validated through several experiments on different simulated robot platforms. We benchmarked our search strategy against a general-purpose heuristic. For large manipulation tasks with 200 objects, our solver implemented using Google's Operations Research tools and ROS requires less than a minute to compute usable plans.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to ICRA'1

The Hamiltonian Cycle and Travelling Salesperson problems with traversal-dependent edge deletion

Variants of the well-known Hamiltonian Cycle and Travelling Salesperson problems have been studied for decades. Existing formulations assume either a static graph or a temporal graph in which edges are available based on some function of time. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of these problems inspired by applications such as open-pit mining, harvesting and painting, in which some edges become deleted or untraversable depending on the vertices that are visited. We formally define these problems and provide both a theoretical and experimental analysis of them in comparison with the conventional versions. We also propose two solvers, based on an exact backward search and a meta-heuristic solver, and provide an extensive experimental evaluation

Comparison of the Effect of Pressure on Bladder-GV20 and Gallbladder-GV20 on Labor Pain Intensity among the Primiparous Women: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Background: The cycle of pain, fear, and anxiety may lead to prolonged labor and cesarean section. Acupressure is one of the methods for pain relief. Aim: Therefore,this study aimed to compare the effect of acupressure on bladder-GV20 and gallbladder-GV20 points on the labor pain in primiparous women. Method: This randomized clinical trial was conducted on 158 primiparous women, who referred to the Um Al-Benin Specialized Women Hospital, Mashhad, Iran in 2017. The first stage of labor included five and four pressure cycles on acupressure points in bladder and gallbladder in the intervention groups 1 and 2, respectively. In the second stage of labor one pressure cycle on the same points were completed. The control group only received the routine cares. The duration of uterine contractions was assessed by touching the uterus apex. Moreover, the pain intensity was evaluated by the visual analog scale. All the data were analyzed by the SPSS version 25 Results: The mean pain intensity in both stages of the intervention groups was significantly different from the control group and was significantly lower in the gallbladder group (

A loosely-coupled approach for multi-robot coordination, motion planning and control

Deploying fleets of autonomous robots in real-world applications requires addressing three problems: motion planning, coordination, and control. Application-specific features of the environment and robots often narrow down the possible motion planning and control methods that can be used. This paper proposes a lightweight coordination method that implements a high-level controller for a fleet of potentially heterogeneous robots. Very few assumptions are made on robot controllers, which are required only to be able to accept set point updates and to report their current state. The approach can be used with any motion planning method for computing kinematically-feasible paths. Coordination uses heuristics to update priorities while robots are in motion, and a simple model of robot dynamics to guarantee dynamic feasibility. The approach avoids a priori discretization of the environment or of robot paths, allowing robots to "follow each other" through critical sections. We validate the method formally and experimentally with different motion planners and robot controllers, in simulation and with real robots