Prospection, the act of predicting the consequences of many possible futures, is intrinsic to human planning and action, and may even be at the root of consciousness. Surprisingly, this idea has been explored comparatively little in robotics. In this work, we propose a neural network architecture and associated planning algorithm that (1) learns a representation of the world useful for generati...

Abstract Robots are becoming more available for workplace collaboration, but many questions remain. Are people actually willing to assign collaborative tasks robots? And if so, exactly which will they what kinds of Here we leverage psychological theories on person-job fit and mind perception investigate task assignment in human–robot work. We propose that robots jobs based their “perceived mind...

Robot soccer is played in a dynamic environment. All robots in a team should select their task dynamically and adaptively in a cooperative manner. This paper proposes a framework for task and role selection strategy for distributed multi-robot coordination and its application to robot soccer. To deal with such a dynamic environment, context-based cooperation method is provided. The robot team h...

The intelligence of a mobile robot is highly dependent on its vision. The main objective of an intelligent mobile robot is in its ability to the online image processing, object detection, and especially visual tracking which is a complex task in stochastic environments. Tracking algorithms suffer from sequence challenges such as illumination variation, occlusion, and background clutter, so an a...

A psychological experiment was conducted to straightforwardly investigate the effects of polite behaviors expressed by robots in Japan, using a small-sized humanoid robot that performed four types of behaviors with voice task instructions. Results of the experiment suggested that the subjects who experienced “deep bowing” motion of the robot felt it more extrovert than those who experienced “ju...

Autonomous mobile robots are promising tools for operations in environments that are difficult to access for humans. When these environments are dynamic and non-deterministic, like in collapsed buildings, the robots must coordinate their actions and the use of resources using planning. This paper presents Planner9, a hierarchical task network (htn) planner that runs on groups of miniature mobil...