Effective algorithms for modular self-reconfiguring robots should be distributed and parallel. In previous work, we explored general algorithms for locomotion and self-replication and explained their instantiations to systems in which modules move over the surface of the robot. In this paper, we describe the instantiation of one such locomotion algorithm to the Crystal robot: a distributed loco...

The NavChair assistive navigation system was originally conceived as an application of mobile robot obstacle avoidance to a power wheelchair. In this system, the user shares wheelchair control with obstacle avoidance and other navigation components. The philosophy of shared control has important implications for the design of these components. This paper discusses the development of navigation ...

We suggest that integration in robotics research is facilitated and enhanced by the process of building embodied robots. It is in the translation of conceptual and simulated models into hardware that the integration takes place. Further, multiple techniques that address similar aspects of the same robotic task have to be merged to achieve good overall performance. In this paper we present two e...

The CMUNITED-98 small-size robot team is a complete autonomous architecture composed of the physical robotic agents, a global vision-processing camera overlooking the playing field, and several clients as the minds of the small-size robot players. The global vision algorithm perceives the environment and processes the images, giving the positions of each robot and the ball. This information is ...

This paper provides an overview of our framework, called physicomimetics, for the distributed control of swarms of robots. We focus on robotic behaviors that are similar to those shown by solids, liquids, and gases. Solid formations are useful for distributed sensing tasks, while liquids are for obstacle avoidance tasks. Gases are handy for coverage tasks, such as surveillance and sweeping. The...

This paper presents a first part, Part-I of two, of a complete exploration and navigation methodology that enables a robot to safely navigate in an unknown environment. Reactive sensor-based navigation tasks and control laws are derived from the interaction between the robot and its workspace. The perception is performed by a 2-D laser range finder mounted on the robot. Reactive navigation task...

We propose a model for learning the articulated motion of human arm and hand grabbing. The goal is to generate plausible trajectories of joints that mimic the human movement using deformation information. The trajectories are then mapped to a constraint space. These constraints can be the space of start and end configuration of the human body and task-specific constraints such as avoiding an ob...

An obstacle avoidance method for use in person following for vision-based autonomous land vehicle (ALV) guidance is proposed. This method is based on the use of vehicle location estimation and a quadratic pattern classifier, and aims to guide the ALV to follow a walking person in front by navigating along a derived collision-free path. Before generating the collision-free path, the person’s loc...

EvacSim is a multi-agent building evacuation simulation featuring pedestrian occupant agents occupying twodimensional continuous free-space to simulate pedestrian egress for building evaluation and evacuation planning support. We detail pedestrian model elements that govern microscopic agent movement such as personal space preservation, obstacle avoidance and moving together as a crowd. We vali...

This paper describes the design of a system for estimating the pose of a camera mounted on a vehicle which moves over a flat floor. The system has been designed to work in conjunction with an obstacle avoidance scheme. Measurements are derived from a sequence of images captured by a single camera rigidly mounted on the vehicle and looking at the floor, and combined with measurements of the vehi...