The Infona portal uses cookies, i.e. strings of text saved by a browser on the user's device. The portal can access those files and use them to remember the user's data, such as their chosen settings (screen view, interface language, etc.), or their login data. By using the Infona portal the user accepts automatic saving and using this information for portal operation purposes. More information on the subject can be found in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. By closing this window the user confirms that they have read the information on cookie usage, and they accept the privacy policy and the way cookies are used by the portal. You can change the cookie settings in your browser.
The paper presents an integration methodology for manufacturing resources and products based on the concept of agentification. This concept associates a software agent to a physical entity in order to simplify the access to its services. In the case of a manufacturing system the services offered by the resources and requested by the products are divided into two classes: material transportation and...
Mobile robots are being employed far more often in extreme environments, such as urban search and rescue, with greater levels of autonomy; yet recent studies on field robotics show that numerous failure modes affect the reliability of the robot in meeting mission objectives. Therefore, fault tolerance is increasingly important for field robots operating in unpredictable environments to ensure safety...
The combination of different characteristics of airborne ultrasonic transducers for ranging applications opens up new applications for autonomous navigation systems in robotics. The features of a Piccolo C2000 MCU are suitable for the design of a ranging system with four channels. Each channel has different operating range and accuracy depending on the transducer characteristics and the implemented...
Thanks to the advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular in automated planning & scheduling and execution, goal-oriented controllers have being developed to test degrees of autonomy for robotics systems in challenging scenarios. Despite these efforts, there is a lack of methodology for approaching the design of deliberative systems or the choice of the critical parameters...
A number of different IoT devices are already available and newer types would appear on the market. A technical difficulty in IoT computing is to manage the heterogeneity of IoT devices in terms of their network protocol supported, interface language, data exchange scheme, and type of mobility provided. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has been effectively utilized to collaborate multiple...
We propose a shared control architecture to enable the modeling of human-in-the-loop cyber physical systems (HiLCPS) in robotics applications. We identify challenges that currently hinder ideas and concepts from cross-domain applications to be shared among different implementation of HiLCPS. The presented architecture is developed with the intent to help bridge the gap between different communities...
A key skill for social robots is the ability to communicate their inner state to humans. In this paper, we explore abstracted robot-specific ways of interaction as an alternative to human-like or animal-like social cues. In particular, we present a sound system as a novel modality that extends a robot's ability for non-verbal communication. Unlike prior work which used pre-recorded audio samples to...
A current trend in marine robotics consists of performance evaluation of Unmanned Marine Vehicles (UMVs) guidance systems. This paper contributes to this by defining and testing performance indices and metrics to quantitatively measure and compare path-following performance. It focuses on the definition of a new criterion for evaluating the capability of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) to follow...
The paper proposes a system architecture for artificial creativity that enables a robot to perform portraits. The proposed cognitive architecture is inspired by the PSI model, and it requires that the motivation of the robot in the execution of its tasks is influenced by urges. Such parameters depend on both internal and external evaluation mechanisms. The system is a premise for the development of...
We introduce Drums, a new tool for monitoring and debugging distributed robot systems, and a complement to robot middleware systems. Drums provides online time-series monitoring of the underlying resources that are partially abstracted away by middleware like ROS. Interfacing with the middleware, Drums provides de-abstraction and de-multiplexing of middleware services to reveal the system-level interactions...
This paper presents a completely autonomous solution to participate in the 2013 International Micro Air Vehicle Indoor Flight Competition (IMAV2013). Our proposal is a modular multi-robot swarm architecture, based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) software framework, where the only information shared among swarm agents is each robot's position. Each swarm agent consists of an AR Drone 2.0 quadrotor...
It is undisputed that number of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) will increase in the coming years. Small unmanned aerial scientific remote sensing systems or “data drones” have great potential to assist the human race with difficult problems such as water management and biofuel production, provided these systems can be integrated properly into society and airspace. The US Federal Aviation Administration...
This paper proposes a new approach for solving well-known industrial automation problems such as Quality Control and Palletization (QCP). An intelligent four-bar mechanism has been designed as a mechanical palletizer. It has been modelled as a singular quadrilateral mechanism whose intelligence is sourced from an image processing algorithm targeted for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) real-time...
During the last years robotic researchers have been able of developing extremely complex applications. The complexity of these applications is reflected by the variety of functionalities involved, which are provided by a significant number of components. Although the reuse of software components is becoming a best-practice, the reuse of reference architectures, which model sub-systems providing functionalities...
Few of the current injection technologies can be applied to those human cells whose diameters are ranged about 10–25 (im only. This paper reports our most recent effort in developing a robot-aided microinjection system to solve the challenging problem of automated injection on human cells. A unique microfluidic cell holding chip is designed and fabricated to trap the single cells in the predefined...
Recently, the open-source robot operating system (ROS) has been growing rapidly in the robotics community. However, the ROS runs on Linux, which does not provide timing guarantees for robot motion. This paper present a hybrid real-time ROS architecture on multi-core processor “RGMP-ROS”, which consists of two parts including the non-real-time subsystem “GPOS (General Operating system)” and the real-time...
This paper provides an overview of an approach to the control of multiple craft with heterogeneous movement and actuation characteristics that is based on the Blackboard software architecture. An overview of the Blackboard architecture is provided. Then, the operational and mission requirements that dictate the need for autonomous control are characterized and the utility of the Blackboard architecture...
We present a specialized FireWire protocol that takes advantage of broadcast messages and peer-to-peer transfers to minimize the number of transactions, and thus the software overhead, on the control PC, thereby enabling fast real-time control. We provide an open source Verilog implementation of a Link Layer Controller (LLC) that supports this design on an FPGA-based motor controller. Performance...
Processes allow the high-level description and execution of service call sequences among multiple devices. Pervasive systems created the need for decentralized and resource-saving process execution environments due to a lack of central high-powered servers for process orchestration. Ubiquitous systems add the aspect of loosely-coupled mobile devices and the strong focus on the user to the list of...
NASA Procedural Requirement (NPR) 7120.5, revision E, was released on August 14, 2012. The new NPR, titled NASA Space Flight Program and Project Management Requirements, communicates NASA's top-level requirements for space flight programs and projects. The requirements are levied on NASA managers and the project engineering and programmatic teams who are developing and operating NASA's space flight...
Set the date range to filter the displayed results. You can set a starting date, ending date or both. You can enter the dates manually or choose them from the calendar.