“The meaning of a word is its use in the language”. In the first half of the 20th century Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced this idea into philosophy and especially in the last few decades, related disciplines such as psychology and linguistics started embracing the view that that natural language is a dynamic system of arbitrary and culturally learnt conventions. From the end of the nineties on, ...

In this report, we propose a system for vision guided autonomous circumnavigation, allowing robots to navigate around objects of arbitrary pose. The system performs model-based object/view recognition from an intensity image using a canonical viewer-centred model. A path planned from a geometric model guides the robot in circumnavigating the object. This system can be used in many applications ...

In this paper, we show how reinforcement learning can be applied to real robots to achieve optimal robot behavior. As example, we enable an autonomous soccer robot to learn intercepting a rolling ball. Main focus is on how to adapt the Q-learning algorithm to the needs of learning strategies for real robots and how to transfer strategies learned in simulation onto real robots.

In many robotic exploration missions, robots have to learn specific policies that allow them to: (i) select high level goals (e.g., identify specific destinations), (ii) navigate (reach those destinations), (iii) and adapt to their environment (e.g., modify their behavior based on changing environmental conditions). Furthermore, those policies must be robust to signal noise or unexpected situat...

knowledge about object classes Object instances and component hierarchy Poses in the environment and their changes over time Related: TBOX/SBOX, Galindo et al (RAS 2008) Semantic map representation Abstract knowledge about object classesknowledge about object classes Object instances and component hierarchy Poses in the environment and their changes over time Spatio-temporal object representati...

Navigation of autonomous vehicles and robots can be divided into two categories: indoor navigation and outdoor navigation. In general the outdoor navigation is more difficult and complex task because often the environment does not have characteristic points that can be identified and with respect to which robots could relate their position. If environment is unstructured (e.g. off-road environm...

In this paper a fuzzy interaction among robots in a group is presented as an alternative solution to the classical protocols used in architectures for the cooperation of robots. In order to achieve this goal, the integration of previous works carried out on fuzzy behaviors and on cooperative architectures at the Intelligent Agents Lab. (LAI) has been used. This cooperation/coordination protocol...

In this paper we discuss an often neglected component of robot reasoning and decision making, which is temporal reasoning. We provide a practical system for temporal reasoning within the framework of production systems and show its application to robot problems. illustrate the use of the temporal production system for that purpose. 2 Temporal Production System In the proposed system the product...

In this paper we present a goal model for the design of autonomous robots. A framework is proposed which allows a developer to design the behaviour of a robot in accordance with a rational model, which is conceived to let the autonomous system to mimic the human behaviour. The framework, called GOLEM, is based on the abstractions of goals and sub-goals, which are combined through specific relat...

The paper discusses technical issues related to autonomous recharging of mobile robots. In doing so, the paper focuses on robots with small to medium energy-consumption, i.e., robots powered by NiCd or NiMH-cells. A concrete set-up with autonomous robotic vehicles and their charging mechanism is presented. Several potential methods for controlling the actual charging are discussed. Pitfalls in ...