In this paper, we propose a PWM (Personal Web Map) which is a personal and small database of interesting Web pages to a user, and develop a method to construct it under the user’s control of multiple Web robots. Though general search engine with large databases like YaHoo, AltaVista, MetaCrawler are valid, it is important that a user constructs a small, personal database of relevant Web pages t...

In this paper we describe the ODUfinder, a novel perception system for autonomous service robots acting in human living environments. The perception system enables robots to detect and recognize large sets of textured objects of daily use. Efficiency, robustness, and a high detection rate are achieved through the combination of modern text retrieval methods that are successfully used for indexi...

The development, deployment, and control of groups of robots is a tedious process even for experienced roboticists. Particularly in heterogeneous systems a high granularity of control and visibility is difficult to achieve. The lack of standardized interfaces and communication protocols to interconnect robots from different manufacturers makes it very difficult to develop flexible robotic appli...

Web robots, crawlers and spiders are software agents that visit Web sites periodically for multiple purposes. Usually, these activities impel the generation of additional clickstream and pattern data that will rise the necessity for extra processing and filtering. Robots are not conventional Web users. However, some of them intentionally pretend to be so. Their requests flood Web server logs, p...

This paper investigates the development of a Web-based quality control system with the use of Internet-based computer machine vision. Such a system allows designers located far from the production facility to monitor, control, and program the quality inspection process as the product design evolves. Quality control tasks are performed and monitored remotely through the Web where Internet-based ...

As more robots act in physical proximity to people, it is essential to ensure they make decisions and execute actions that align with human values. To do so, robots need to understand the true intentions behind human-issued commands. In this paper, we define a safe robot as one that receives a natural-language command from humans, considers an action in response to that command, and accurately ...

Surgical robots have the potential to provide surgeons with increased capabilities, such as removing physiologic tremor, scaling motion and increasing manual dexterity. Several surgical specialties have subsequently integrated robotic surgery into common clinical practice. Plastic and reconstructive microsurgical procedures have not yet benefitted significantly from technical developments obser...

Social robots (personal robots) emphasize individualized social interaction and communication with people. To maximize communication capacity of a personal robot, designers make it more anthropomorphic (or zoomorphic), and people tend to interact more naturally with such robots. However, adapting anthropomorphism (or zoomorphism) in social robots makes morphology of a robot more complex; thus, ...