Dante II is a unique walking robot that provides important insight into high-mobility robotic locomotion and remote robotic exploration. Dante Il's uniqueness stems from its combined legged and rappelling mobility...
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Dante II is a unique walking robot that provides important insight into high-mobility robotic locomotion and remote robotic exploration. Dante Il's uniqueness stems from its combined legged and rappelling mobility system, its scanning-laser rangefinder and its multilevel control scheme, In 1994 Dante II was deployed and successfully rested in a remote Alaskan volcano, as a demonstration of the fieldworthiness of these technologies. For more than five days the robot explored alone in the volcano crater using a combination of supervised autonomous control and teleoperated control. Human operators were located 120 km distant during the mission. This article first describes in detail the robot, support systems, control techniques. and user interfaces. We then describe results from the battery of field tests leading up to and including the volcanic mission. Finally, we put forth important lessons which comprise the legacy of this project We show that framewalkers are appropriate for rappelling in severe terrain, though tether systems have limitations. We also discuss the importance of future "autonomous" systems to realize when they require human support rather than relying on humans for constant oversight.
Traffic monitoring is a key issue to develop smarter and more sustainable cities in the future, allowing to make a better use of the public space and reducing pollution. This work presents an aerial swarm that continu...
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Traffic monitoring is a key issue to develop smarter and more sustainable cities in the future, allowing to make a better use of the public space and reducing pollution. This work presents an aerial swarm that continuously monitors the traffic in SwarmCity, a simulated city developed in Unity game engine where drones and cars are modeled in a realistic way. The control algorithm of the aerial swarm is based on six behaviors with twenty-three parameters that must be tuned. The optimization of parameters is carried out with a genetic algorithm in a simplified and faster simulator. The best resulting configurations are tested in SwarmCity showing good efficiencies in terms of observed cars over total cars during time windows. The algorithm reaches a good performance making use of an acceptable computational time for the optimization. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
control in behavior-based systems is distributed among a set of specialized behaviors. To achieve efficient implementation, behaviors exploit specific assumptions about a given task and environment. Thus they become v...
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control in behavior-based systems is distributed among a set of specialized behaviors. To achieve efficient implementation, behaviors exploit specific assumptions about a given task and environment. Thus they become vulnerable to deviations that render these assumptions invalid. Yet it is important to provide appropriate responses to unforeseen situations. We demonstrate that, using voting techniques, a model-free approach may be provided to construct reliable behaviors from a multitude of less reliable ones. A team of complementary behaviors vote for the set of possible actions, and the action which is meet favored is selected for controlling the system. We conjecture that selecting actions according to this scheme can improve the probability of success. Our conjecture is investigated through two sets of experiments. In the first, a team of obstacle avoidance behaviors vote to guide a mobile robot platform in the most appropriate direction. In the second, four object tracking modules are integrated to perform smooth pursuit with a camera head. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Industrial robots are well suited for performing manipulation or material handling tasks in highly constrained and predictable environments. By contrast, living organisms are highly adaptive and capable of performing ...
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Industrial robots are well suited for performing manipulation or material handling tasks in highly constrained and predictable environments. By contrast, living organisms are highly adaptive and capable of performing tasks in changing environments, such as stable locomotion over uneven terrain. The challenge to the field of robotics is to use inspiration from biology to develop systems capable of operating in unconstrained or partially constrained environments. We summarize traditional methods for robot control and then present an approach to based on biological principles, with emphasis on perception, control, and cognitive architectures. The principles are illustrated with four examples of robotic systems.
The mobile post distribution system MOPS has been developed at the ETH Zurich during the last few years. A service robot like MOPS is a highly complex system, as it includes, in addition to the robot itself, the task,...
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The mobile post distribution system MOPS has been developed at the ETH Zurich during the last few years. A service robot like MOPS is a highly complex system, as it includes, in addition to the robot itself, the task, the operator, and the environment. Operating experiences with such service robots are not easily available vet. They would be of value, as, in the end, customer acceptance will decide upon the actual use of service robots. In this paper, technical aspects of the realization of MOPS are discussed briefly. Furthermore, operating experiences, lessons learned and consequences are commented upon. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V AII rights reserved.
This study introduces a method to enable a robot to learn how to perform new tasks through human demonstration and independent practice. The proposed process consists of two interconnected phases;in the first phase, s...
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This study introduces a method to enable a robot to learn how to perform new tasks through human demonstration and independent practice. The proposed process consists of two interconnected phases;in the first phase, state-action data are obtained from human demonstrations, and an aggregated state space is learned in terms of a decision tree that groups similar states together through reinforcement learning. Without the postprocess of trimming, in tree induction, the tree encodes a control policy that can be used to control the robot by means of repeatedly improving itself. Once a variety of behaviors is learned, more elaborate behaviors can be generated by selectively organizing several behaviors using another Q-learning algorithm. The composed outputs of the organized basic behaviors on the motor level are weighted using the policy learned through Q-learning. This approach uses three diverse Q-learning algorithms to learn complex behaviors. The experimental results show that the learned complicated behaviors, organized according to individual basic behaviors by the three Q-learning algorithms on different levels, can function more adaptively in a dynamic environment.
This work demonstrates the application of the distributed behavior-based approach [1] to generating a multi-robot controller for a group of mobile robots performing a clean-up and collection task. The paper studies a ...
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This work demonstrates the application of the distributed behavior-based approach [1] to generating a multi-robot controller for a group of mobile robots performing a clean-up and collection task. The paper studies a territorial approach to the task in which the robots are assigned individual territories that can be dynamically resized if one of the robots malfunctions, permitting the completion of the task. The described controller is implemented on a group of four IS Robotics R2e mobile robots. Using a collection of experimental robot data, we empirically derive and demonstrate most effective foraging in our domain, and show the decline of performance of the space division strategy with increased group size.
Ant-like systems take advantage of agents' situatedness to reduce or eliminate the need for centralized control or global knowledge. This reduces the need for complexity of individuals and leads to robust, scalabl...
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Ant-like systems take advantage of agents' situatedness to reduce or eliminate the need for centralized control or global knowledge. This reduces the need for complexity of individuals and leads to robust, scalable systems. Such insect-inspired situated approaches have proven effective both for task performance and task allocation. The desire for general, principled techniques for situated interaction has led us to study the exploitation of abstract situatedness - situatedness in non-physical environments. The port-arbitrated behavior-based control approach provides a well-structured abstract behavior space in which agents can participate in situated interaction. We focus on the problem of role assumption, distributed task allocation in which each agent selects its own task-performing role. This paper details our general, principled Broadcast of Local Eligibility (BLE) technique for role-assumption in such behavior-space-situated systems, acid provides experimental results from the CMOMMT target-tracking task.
Despite the growth of data-rich environments and the increase in data accessibility, studies have offered limited insights into how to lead and control information technology (IT) outsourcing projects to benefit from ...
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Despite the growth of data-rich environments and the increase in data accessibility, studies have offered limited insights into how to lead and control information technology (IT) outsourcing projects to benefit from these trends. To address the research gap, this study investigates the effect of big data accessibility on project performance, and analyzes the moderating effects of vendors' leadership styles and outsourcers' control mechanisms from a vendor's perspective. based on absorptive capacity theory, we develop five hypotheses and examine them using data from 195 IT outsourcing projects. The results show that big data accessibility has a positive effect on IT outsourcing project performance, but that the effect varies with vendors' leadership styles and outsourcers' control mechanisms. Specifically, the positive effect of big data accessibility is weakened by vendors' transactional leadership and outsourcers' behavior-based control, whereas it is strengthened by vendors' transformational leadership and outsourcers' outcome-basedcontrol. This study contributes to the literature by identifying distinct roles of different leadership styles and different control mechanisms in leveraging big data accessibility.
To get the best features of both deliberative and reactive controllers, present mobile robot control architectures are designed to accommodate both types of controller. However, these architectures are still very rigi...
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To get the best features of both deliberative and reactive controllers, present mobile robot control architectures are designed to accommodate both types of controller. However, these architectures are still very rigidly structured thus deliberative modules are always assigned to the same role as a high-level planner or sequencer while low-level reactive modules are still the ones directly interacting with the robot environment. Furthermore, within these architectures communication and interface between modules are if not strongly established, they are very complex thus making them unsuitable for simple robotic systems. Our idea in this paper is to present a control architecture that is flexible in the sense that it can easily integrate both reactive and deliberative modules but not necessarily restricting the role of each type of controller. Communication between modules is through simple arbitration schemes while interface is by connecting a common communication line between modules and simple read and/or write access of data objects. On top of these features, the proposed control architecture is scalable and exhibits graceful degradation when some of the modules fail, similar to the present mobile robot architectures. Our idea has enabled our four-legged robot to walk autonomously in a structured uneven terrain.
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