This paper presents the mechanical hardware and control software of a novel high-performance active vision system. It is the latest in an ongoing research effort to develop real-world vision systems based on cable-drive transmissions. The head presented in this paper is the laboratory’s first fully cable-driven binocular rig, and builds on several successful aspects of previous monocular protot...

Original scientific paper The main function of industrial automation networks (IANs) is to monitor and control processes. In general, the sensor nodes utilize batteries as an energy source to control processes. The clustered IAN aims at maximizing the lifetime of the sensor node by improving the energy efficiency. The proposed system is targeted for utilization of the long distance wireless tra...

Biological organisms perceive and act in the world based on spatiotemporal experiences and interpretations. However, artificial agents consider mainly the spatial relationships that exist in the world, typically ignoring its temporal aspects. In an attempt to direct research interest towards the fundamental issue of time experiencing, the current work explores two temporally different versions ...

This paper reports on an exercise on constructing a visual animation layer for a behaviourally-intensive reactive system. We assume that the requirements of the system under consideration are described by use cases, and the behaviour of each use case is detailed by a collection of scenario descriptions. These use cases and scenarios are translated into a Coloured Petri Net (CPN) model, which is...

Distributing control appropriately between man and machine is particularly pertinent to assistive technology. We use shared control techniques to augment wheelchair users’ capabilities, enabling them to safely perform precise manoeuvres. In this paper, we investigate the effects of our collaborative controller on the driver, in terms of how their behavioural interaction with the wheelchair chan...

We present results from the concurrent evolution of visual sensing morphologies and sensory-motor controller-networks for visually guided robots. In this paper we analyse two (of many) networks which result from using incremental evolution with variable-length genotypes. The two networks come from separate populations, evolved using a common tness function. The observable behaviours of the two ...

This paper presents a solution for the behavioural animation of autonomous virtual agent navigation in virtual environments. We focus on using Dempster-Shafer’s Theory of Evidence in developing visual sensor for virtual agent. The role of the visual sensor is to capture the information about the virtual environment or identifie which part of an obstacle can be seen from the position of the virt...

Generally speaking, the behavioural strategies of a multirobot system can be defined as scalable if the performance of the system does not drop by increasing the cardinality of the group. The research work presented in this paper studies the issue of scalability in artificial neural network controllers designed by evolutionary algorithms. The networks are evolved to control homogeneous group of...

This paper describes work carried out to investigate whether a classic simulated reaction-diffusion (RD) system could be used to control a ‘minimally cognitive’ animat during the course of a simple memory test. This test required the animat to remember an arbitrary signal and adapt its behaviour as a result. A further requirement was that the effects of the first signal be reversed by a second ...

Model predictive controller is widely used in industrial plants. Uncertainty is one of the critical issues in real systems. In this paper, the direct adaptive Simplified Model Predictive Control (SMPC) is proposed for unknown or time varying plants with uncertainties. By estimating the plant step response in each sample, the controller is designed and the controller coefficients are directly ca...