This paper considers the possible limits of reactive control architectures for autonomous robots, in terms of their non-linear dynamics. This validates work [Gat 94] which has suggested that such systems can manifest chaotic dynamics in their response to unstructured environments. Our work has involved two parallel activities, the first being research and development of two B12 robots, which us...

The rescue robots developed at the International University Bremen (IUB) are semi-autonomous mobile robots providing streams of video and other essential data via wireless connections to human operated basestations, supplemented by various basic and optional behaviors on board of the robots. Due to the limitations of wireless connections and the complexity of rescue operations, the full operati...

The distributed coordination and control of a team of autonomous mobile robots is a problem widely studied in a variety of fields, such as engineering, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics. Generally, in these areas, the problem is studied mostly from an empirical point of view. Recently, a significant research effort has been and continues to be spent on understanding the fundame...

Autonomous robotic vehicle are robots which can perform certain desired tasks in a dynamic environment without human guidance to a certain degree. Most autonomous robots rely heavily on readily available off-the-shelf sensors to perform navigation. The research published here shows a glimpse of an innovative application of image processing in future robotic vehicles, which are capable of making...

Within the HRI community, Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) methods have been extensively used to explore robot interactions. However, their wide usage has also been criticized as not giving good representation of how real, autonomous robots can interact. In this paper, I argue that thoughtfully designed Wizard-of-Oz control interfaces can enable robot designers to explore the interaction design space fur hum...

The Martha project objectives are the control and the management of a eet of au tonomous mobile robots for transshipment tasks in harbours airports and marshaling yards Our presentation focuses on one of the most challenging and key problems of the Martha project the multi robot cooperation Indeed high level missions are produced by a Central Station and sent to robots It is then up to the robo...

The “Talking Robots” experiment, inspired by the “Talking Heads” experiment from Sony, explores possibilities on how to ground symbols into perception using language, with two autonomous Aibo robots in an unconstrained environment. We present here the first results of this experiment and outline in the conclusion a planned extension to social behaviors grounding.

Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive. The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails. The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components. Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheele...

A manufacturing workcell model employs behavior-based swarm robots whose emergent behavior successfully performs the workcell’s required materials handling without central planning. Swarm robots are groups of autonomous mobile robots whose sensory-driven state behavior produces emergent group functionality not characteristic of the individual robots. Processing machines within the workcell broa...