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Policy Gradient methods require many real-world trials. Some of the trials may endanger the robot system and cause its rapid wear. Therefore, a safe or at least gentle-to-wear exploration is a desired property. We incorporate bounds on the probability of unwanted trials into the recent Contextual Relative Entropy Policy Search method. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on the task of autonomous flipper...
Predictive Processing (PP) [1], [2], [3] is becoming an influential account in cognitive neuroscience, including developmental neuroscience [4]. According to PP, human brains interpret their sensory inputs by predicting them, based on a hierarchy of generative models. These predictions are then compared to the actual, observed inputs, and the difference between predictions and observations (so-called...
Traditional software development relies on building and assembling pieces of software in order to satisfy explicit requirements. Component-based software engineering simplifies composition and reuse, but software adaptation to the environment remains a challenge. Opportunistic composition is a new approach for building and re-building software in open and dynamic contexts. It is based on the ability...
In robotic navigation, biologically inspired localization models have often exhibited interesting features and proven to be competitive with other solutions in terms of adaptability and performance. In general, place recognition systems rely on global or local visual descriptors; or both. In this paper, we propose a model of context-based place cells combining these two information. Global visual...
Helper robots will be critical in many sectors: helping our elderly and disabled in assisted living facilities, conducting search-and-rescue missions in unforgiving terrain to save human lives, assisting our astronauts on the space station, or even monitoring our surroundings to keep us safe from national security threats. The ultimate goal of our research is to endow robots in these critical sectors...
We are combining symbolic and geometric planning to synthesize human-aware plans in order to deal with the complex and highly intricate planning problems induced by Human-Robot collaborative object manipulation. In this paper, we summarize our previous contributions - refining symbolic actions at geometric level, during the symbolic planning, in order to assess their feasibility and computing the...
Mapping evolving environments requires an update mechanism to efficiently deal with dynamic objects. In this context, we propose a new approach to update maps pertaining to large-scale dynamic environments with semantics. While previous works mainly rely on large amount of observations, the proposed framework is able to build a stable representation with only two observations of the environment. To...
Service computing technologies have been widely applied to many application domains to facilitate rapid system integration for desired goals. However, existing service models need to be enhanced for cyber-physical systems (CPS) and internet-of-things (IoT). In this paper, we develop an ontology model for the specification of services in CPS/IoT. First, we discuss the major differences in modeling...
Accurate dynamic models can be very difficult to compute analytically for complex robots; moreover, using a precomputed fixed model does not allow to cope with unexpected changes in the system. An interesting alternative solution is to learn such models from data, and keep them up-to-date through online adaptation. In this paper we consider the problem of learning the robot inverse dynamic model under...
Map matching is a fundamental task in many robot vision applications, including viewpoint localization, change detection, alignment, merging, segmentation of maps, and multi-robot mapping. Existing frameworks so far have concentrated on local feature-based approach, where discriminative local features are extracted from the maps and visual indexing and map database searched are performed to find correspondence...
State estimation and control are intimately related processes in robot handling of flexible and articulated objects. While for rigid objects, we can generate a CAD model before-hand and a state estimation boils down to estimation of pose or velocity of the object, in case of flexible and articulated objects, such as a cloth, the representation of the object's state is heavily dependent on the task...
The ability to act in a socially-aware way is a key skill for robots that share a space with humans. In this paper we address the problem of socially-aware navigation among people that meets objective criteria such as travel time or path length as well as subjective criteria such as social comfort. Opposed to model-based approaches typically taken in related work, we pose the problem as an unsupervised...
We propose an algorithm for a visibility-based pursuit-evasion problem in a simply-connected two-dimensional environment, in which a single pursuer has access to a probabilistic model describing how the evaders are likely to move in the environment. The application of our algorithm can be best viewed in the context of search and rescue: Although the victims (evaders) are not actively trying to escape...
The utterance `She is a bulldozer' is not interpreted by a person to refer to a piece of construction equipment but to mean something like `She is powerful'. Thus, interpretations of language are affected by contexts. This phenomenon does not only apply to metaphor. According to `Metaphors We Live By' (Lakoff and Johnson), our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is...
Granuloma is a medical term for a ball-like collection of immune cells that attempts to remove foreign substances from a host organism. This response is a special type of inflammatory reaction common to a wide variety of diseases. Granulomas are an organised collection of macrophages, whose formation involves the stimulation of macrophages as well as T-Cells. Fault tolerance in swarm robotic systems...
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are combinations of physical entities controlled by software systems to accomplish specified tasks under stringent real-time and physical entity constraints. As more and more physical entities are equipped with embedded computers, they are becoming more and more intelligent. However, the problem of effectively composing the services provided by cyber and physical entities...
This paper presents an on-going work, which aims to build a generic framework for the conception and the development of ubiquitous applications. This work is based on a model driven engineering approach and pays attention to possible failures and to the use of virtual reality to improve the quality of the experience for the user.
In evolutionary robotics, controllers are often designed in simulation, then transferred onto the real system. Nevertheless, when no accurate model is available, controller transfer from simulation to reality means potential performance loss. It is the reality gap problem. Unmanned aerial vehicles are typical systems where it may arise. Their locomotion dynamics may be hard to model because of a limited...
The paper presents a transdisciplinary perspective on mechatronical knowledge achievement. Starting from the beginnings of the mechatronics, are presented the five stages of the way the mechatronics emerged as an educational paradigm, as a reflexive logic-creative way of communication and a socio-interactive system of thinking, living and acting in a transdisciplinary context. Very important is the...
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