The effectiveness of mobile robots has always been affected by the amount of time they can spend in the field. Most mobile robots today are equipped with rechargeable batteries which allow a robot to recharge in the field without extended interruption of its work. Mobile recharging units are crucial for a team of robots to effectively perform their assigned tasks over long periods of time. Mobi...

The application fields of autonomous mobile robots recently extend from indoor uses to outdoor uses. Rescue systems and planetary explorations are typical examples for such outdoor mobile robots. In such field, it is required to have both of rapid movement and adaptive function to rough terrain, while general wheel mechanisms are not suitable for such rough environments. To move in these enviro...

Manipulation is an essential capability for mobile robots to perform many useful tasks. Our focus has been on mobile robots with nonprehensile (i.e., nongrasping) manipulators. Here, the robots are equipped with a flat “palm” with two degrees of freedom. We have tackled the problem of carrying an object using two such mobile manipulators. Since these manipulators cannot grasp an object, each ro...

Research on the cooperation of multiple mobile robots has to address three main problems: (i) how to appropriately divide the functionality of the system into multiple robots, (ii) how to manage the dynamic configuration of the system in order to realise co-operative behaviours, and (iii) how to achieve coordination and learning for a team of mobile robots. This paper addresses these issues usi...

Vision is a very important sense for humans. Robots also need to be aware of their environment for working in it. This is even more important for mobile robots that operate in unknown environments that are not prepared for robots. In this paper, we focus on the aspect of navigation of mobile robots for applications in search and rescue as well as planetary exploration. We discuss a typical visi...

This paper provides a new approach to the dynamic motion planning problems of mobile robots in uncertain dynamic environments based on the behavior dynamics from a control point of view. The fundamental behavior of a mobile robot in motion planning is regarded as a dynamic process of the interaction between the robot and its local environment, and then it is modeled and controlled for the motio...

We are interested in designing applications for autonomous mobile robots and robot swarms to accomplish tasks such as terrain analysis, search and rescue, and chemical plume source tracing. These tasks require robots to avoid obstacles and reach a goal. We use X80Pro mobile robots designed and developed by Dr.Robot Inc. for task applications. The vendor provided software framework with graphica...

This paper presents a design and implementation of cooperative edge detection of multiple mobile robots in an indoor environment. We propose a method to fuse sensory data from two mobile robots at different locations based on Kalman filtering techniques. To demonstrate the proposed method, we constructed two mobile robots for experimental purpose. A USB Web camera was put at the front of each r...

Research and Development of humanoid/animal robots is being actively pursued, and it is expected that in the near future these robots will be introduced into our homes as “home robots”. The key function of these robots is their ability to communicate with humans. Since communication via mobile phones is becoming increasingly common among us, it is essential for these robots also to be able to c...

This paper presents a probabilistic algorithm for collaborative mobile robot localization. Our approach uses a sample-based version of Markov localization, capable of localizing mobile robots in an any-time fashion. When teams of robots localize themselves in the same environment, probabilistic methods are employed to synchronize each robot’s belief whenever one robot detects another. As a resu...