With the development of safe collaborative robots, the introduction of these systems into human teams, as teammates, is starting to occur in sectors such as space, military and industry. Consequently, to accomplish a seamless integration, evaluating human factors which can prevent human-robot teams from functioning well, and developing reliable, efficient algorithms for task planning is essenti...

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in surgery has been an emerging field of study in recent years, which aims at incorporating the advantages of both surgeon and machine to improve safety, accuracy and speed. In this work, we propose a cross-platform, open-source framework that would facilitate surgical HRC research. The work is based on CoSTAR, a Behavior-Tree based framework for end-user instruc...

Humans use eye gaze in their daily interaction with other humans. Humanoid robots, on the other hand, have not yet taken full advantage of this form of implicit communication. We designed a passive monocular gaze tracking system implemented on the iCub humanoid robot [17]. The validation of the system proved that it is a viable low-cost, calibration-free gaze tracking solution for humanoid plat...

Learning by imitation enables people to program robots simply by showing them what to do, instead of having to specify the motor commands of the robot. To achieve imitative behaviour in a simulated robot, a modular connectionist architecture for motor learning and control was implemented. The architecture was used to imitate human dance movements. The architecture self-organizes the decompositi...

This paper deals with the simulation of a dynamical system in which the motion of each rigid robot is subject to the influence of virtual forces induced by geometric constraints. These constraints may impose joint connectivity and angle limits for articulated robots, spatial relationships between multiple collaborative robots, or have a robot follow an estimated path to perform certain tasks in...

Abstract Collaborative robots (“cobots”) have attracted growing attention in academia and industry over the last years. Due to in-built safety features easy programming, they allow for close human-cobot collaboration support e.g. flexible manufacturing. However, lack of a common understanding what cobot is along with its traditional focus on arm-based cobots complicates further research adoptio...

In human–robot collaborative assembly tasks, it is necessary to properly balance skills maximize productivity. Human operators can contribute with their abilities in dexterous manipulation, reasoning and problem solving, but a bounded workload (cognitive, physical, timing) should be assigned for the task. Collaborative robots provide accurate, quick precise physical work skills, they have const...

Collaborative technologies can help improve work conditions for operators with any profile, in demanding production tasks. This paper presents an intervention intermediate stage of a Metal Injection Molding (MIM) manufacturing process poor ergonomics, both physical and stress-related, due to sustained visual attention demands. A collaborative workstation was designed implemented, integrating ro...

Societies are formed as collaborative structures to execute tasks which are not possible or are difficult for individuals alone. There are many types of biological societies formed by animals, but societies formed by machines or robots are still rare. This paper introduces the concept of an application oriented robot society formed by autonomous underwater robots. This bacterium robot society i...

The development of hand-crafted action and dialog generation models for a social robot is a time consuming process that yields a solution only for the relatively narrow range of interactions envisioned by the programmers. In this paper, we propose a data-driven solution for interactive behavior generation that leverages online games as a means of collecting large-scale data corpora for human-ro...