Advanced autonomous robotsmay someday be required to negotiate environments and situations that their designers had not anticipated. The future designers of these robots may not have adequate expertise to provide appropriate control algorithms in the case that an unforeseen situation is encountered in a remote environment in which a robot cannot be accessed. It is not always practical or even p...

This paper implements a Neuro-Fuzzy (FNN) approach to autonomously navigate a car-like robot in an unknown environment. The applied technique allows the robot to avoid obstacles and locally search for a path leading to the goal after learning and adaptation. It is based on two Fuzzy Artmap neural networks, a Reinforcement trial and error neural network and a Mamdani fuzzy logic controller (FLC)...

In this paper, we propose a mobile robot system which has functions of person following and autonomous returning. The robot realizes these functions by analyzing information obtained with camera and laser range finder. Person following is performed by using HOG features, color information, and shape of range data. Along with person following, a map of the ambient environment is generated from t...

This paper covers the problem of Collision Free Path Planning for an autonomous robot and proposes a solution to it through the Back Propagation Neural Network. The solution is transformed into a composition of matrix-multiplication operations, which is a classic example of problems that can be efficiently parallelized. This paper finally proposes a parallel implementation of this matrix-multip...

Abstract Truly autonomous robots, either as single units or in groups will be required to generate and manage their own energy. This paper explores the idea of robot ‘trophallaxis’ whereby one robot can donate an amount of its own internal energy reserve to another. Different strategies for energy transfer are considered within the test simulation scenario of a police 'search line' task. We loo...

This paper deals with coordinating behaviour in a multi-autonomous robot system. When two or more autonomous robots must interact in order to accomplish some common goal, communication between the robots is essential. Di erent inter-robot communications strategies give rise to di erent overall system performance and reliability. After a brief consideration of some theoretical approaches to mult...

This paper describes a series of experiments that were performed on the Rocky III robot.1 Rocky III is a small autonomous rover capable of navigating through rough outdoor terrain to a predesignated area, searching that area for soft soil, acquiring a soil sample, and depositing the sample in a container at its home base. The robot is programmed according to a reactive behaviorcontrol paradigm ...

With the growth of computational power in recent years, complex autonomous robot systems have become a possibility. To increase their flexibility and adaptability, learning mechanisms are necessary for robot control. In this paper, I present two recent legged robot-systems that use machine-learning in their foothold-selection process. It was found that currently both systems have a number of is...

Autonomous navigation of mobile robots in an uncertain and complex environment is a broad and complicated issue due to a variety of obstacles that mobile robots have to detect and represent in their maps to navigate safely. The objective of the navigation-mobile robot is to obtain an optimum path, meaning that the robot should plan a reliable path between the source point and the target point w...

In this paper the European flagship project proposal Robot Companion for Citizens (RCC), grounded on the idea of developing robot companions for citizens, is taken as a case scenario for investigating the feasibility of ascribing rights and duties to autonomous robots from a legal and philosophical standpoint. In talking about rights and duties with respect to robots endowed with autonomous dec...