Title of Document: Novel Integrated System Architecture for an Autonomous Jumping Micro-Robot Wayne A. Churaman, M.S., 2010 Directed By: Dr. Neil Goldsman, ECE ; Dr. Sarah Bergbreiter, ME As the capability and complexity of robotic platforms continue to evolve from the macro to micro-scale, innovation of such systems is driven by the notion that a robot must be able to sense, think, and act [1]...

In the control of autonomous mobile robots there exist two types of control: global control and local control. The requirement to solve global and local tasks arises respectively. This chapter concentrates on local tasks and shows that robots can learn to cope with some local tasks within minutes. The main idea of the chapter is to show that, while creating intelligent control systems for auton...

An overview of an autonomous helicopter test-bed project at the Autonomous Robots Lab of the University of Southern California is presented. The core of this test-bed is a new autonomous helicopter, the Autonomous Flying Vehicle-II (AFV-II). The AFV-II is an evolution of the original AFV vehicle described in Lewis et al., (1993). The major features of the new vehicle system are: An on-board red...

This paper considers the problem of a robot navigating in a crowded or congested environment. A robot operating in such an environment can get easily blocked by moving humans and other objects. To deal with this problem it is proposed to attempt to predict the motion trajectory of humans and obstacles. Two kinds of prediction are considered: short-term and long-term. The short-term prediction r...

Many robot applications require mobility in constrained spaces and a high degree of flexibility. This paper describes the development of an autonomous serpentine robot. This robot is a 12 degree of freedom, untethered, hyper-redundant planar robot, named Kaa. Experiments were conducted in its application to mobility tasks that would be useful in locomotion among parallel pipe structures similar...

We introduce a novel paradigm for robot programming with which we aim to make robot programming more accessible for unexperienced users. In order to do so we incorporate two major components in one single framework: autonomous skill acquisition by robotic playing and visual programming. Simple robot program skeletons solving a task for one specific situation, so-called basic behaviours, are pro...

A stationary robot in an assembly line expects to execute all its hard-coded movements without any collision. Its recognition is limited to its tasks and the corresponding area of operation. In case of a failure an alarm is given and it stops working until a human being corrects the fault. The assembly robot does not react independently, which is the exact opposite to autonomous mobile robots. ...

Spartacus, our 2005 AAAI Mobile Robot Challenge entry, integrated planning and scheduling, sound source localization, tracking and separation, message reading, speech recognition and generation, and autonomous navigation capabilities onboard a custom-made interactive robot. Integration of such a high number of capabilities revealed interesting new issues such as coordinating audio/visual/graphi...

In this paper, the concept of human-robot-team is presented. Because of its high flexibility and adaptability, the human-robot cooperation is expected to have a wide range of applications in uncertain environments, not only in future construction and manufacturing industries but also in service branches. A multi-agent control architecture gives an appropriate frame for the flexibility of the hu...