extraordinarily difficult and poses challenges for both integration and grounding. Here, I propose a unifying idea that meets both challenges: language games. A language game is a sequence of verbal interactions between two agents situated in a specific environment. Language games both integrate the various activities required for dialogue and ground unknown words or phrases in a specific conte...

Research related to diver safety, navigation and monitoring has been identified as crucial for advancing diving activities. These issues are usually dealt with by pairing up divers and adopting well defined rules for diving operations to reduce the chance of accidents. However, during more challenging dives (such as technical dives) these procedures may not be sufficient to ensure almost accide...

Developmental robotics is concerned with the design of algorithms that promote robot adaptation and learning through qualitative growth of behaviour and increasing levels of competence. This paper uses ideas and inspiration from early infant psychology (up to 3 months of age) to examine how robot systems could discover the structure of their local sensory-motor spaces and learn how to coordinat...

This chapter introduces a swarm intelligence-inspired approach for target allocation in large teams of autonomous robots. For this purpose, the Distributed Bees Algorithm (DBA) was proposed and developed by the authors. The algorithm allows decentralized decision-making by the robots based on the locally available information, which is an inherent feature of animal swarms in nature. The algorit...

An example of a reactive, mobile, embedded control system that has received considerable attention during the last decade is the autonomous mobile robot. The flurry of research activities in this area can be directly traced to the many exciting current and future applications where robotic systems are safer/cheaper/more effective than their human counterparts. Examples of current applications i...

Gestures and other body movements of humanoid robots can be used to convey meanings which are extracted from an input signal, such as speech or music. For example, the humanoid robot waves its arm to say goodbye or nods its head to dance to the beats of the music. This thesis investigates how to autonomously animate a real humanoid robot given an input signal. This thesis addresses five core ch...

The goal of this research is to enable a multi-limbed robot to climb vertical rock using techniques similar to those developed by human climbers. The robot consists of a small number of articulated limbs. Only the limb end-points can make contact with the environment—a vertical surface with small, arbitrarily distributed features called holds. A path through this environment is a sequence of on...

One of the major tasks of autonomous robot navigation elimination of robot errors. These errors are caused by imperfections in the design and mechanical implementation of robots. This paper presents experimental and statistical analysis of wheeled robots. The mobile robots consist of three differential drive robots that tested and moved in given trajectories and then the systematic errors of th...

Fluidically driven robots with biologically inspired actuators p. 97 Concept for energy-autarkic, autonomous climbing robots p. 107 Navigation of walking robots : path planning p. 115 Study on mobility of connected crawler robotby using GA p. 123 A robot that climbs walls using micro-structured polymer feet p. 131 Novel solutions to design problems of industrial climbing robots p. 139 Fast poin...