A three-level functional architecture for a team of mobile robots is described in detail, including the deenition of the role assigned to each level, the main concepts involved, and the corresponding implementation for each individual robot. The architecture is oriented towards teams of fully autonomous cooperative robots, able to carry out diierent types of cooperative tasks. Complexity is red...

Although groups of robots are expected to interact with groups of humans in the near future, research related to teams of humans and robots still appears scarce. This paper contributes to the study of human-robot teams by investigating how humans choose robots to partner with in a multi-party game context. The novelty of our work concerns the successful design and development of two social robo...

With a few exceptions, today’s mobile robots, however complex, are not truly autonomous. At some time, they all require humans to supply them with energy and/or information; most also require other forms of assistance. In complete contrast, even the simplest animals are totally self-sufficient. We describe a current project1 which aims to construct autonomous robots with animal-like self-suffic...

The ARK mobile robot project has designed and implemented a series of mobile robots capable of navigating within industrial environments without relying on arti cial landmarks or beacons. The ARK robots employ a novel sensor, Laser Eye, that combines vision and laser ranging to e ciently locate the robot in a map of its environment. Laser Eye allows self-location of the robot in both walled and...

This paper presents the first approach towards the main goal of developing a completely autonomous robot that serves as a local and remote guide

Navigation and application functionality of mobile robots rely on their collision-avoiding capabilities, also known as local navigation. We present the mobile robot ARTOS (Autonomous Robot for Transport and Service) that is particularly designed to operate in living environments and therefore faces the problem of fuzzy and unstructured obstacles. The local navigation architecture is motivated r...

In this communication we address the problem of shape recognition in the context of autonomous navigation of mobile robots. We present an association procedure which is able to establish the correspondence between elements of a learned fuzzy internal representation of the environment and currently perceived objects. Using this procedure, a mobile robot is able to periodically decrease the uncer...

This paper proposes a new self-localization algorithm, called dual-circle self-localization algorithm, for use in omnidirectional vision robots. When an autonomous robot navigates in the field, it senses the environment by an omnidirectional vision device fitted on the robot. The landmarks information is acquired by using image processing and pattern recognition techniques. Robot position on th...