This paper describes the application of the task priority Null Space Behavioral technique to the coordinated control of a team of flying vehicles with hovering capabilities, like helicopters or quadrotors, in the presence of obstacles and no-fly zones. Once a flight mission is assigned to the team in terms of a target region to reach, each flying vehicle is required to accomplish four tasks wit...

RoboCup soccer is still host to frequent collisions between robots that lead to unsavory gameplan that is typically not allowed in human soccer. In the Standard Platform league where ultrasonic sensors are employed, these collisions are forbidden, but there is still leniency in the Humanoid League. Additionally, advanced behaviors, such as dribbling, require robust obstacle avoidance strategies...

Acquisition of an active bar-pressing avoidance response was investigated in a factorial design with 3, 5 or 9 s CS-US intervals and CSs of 70- or 50-dB of white noise. As the CS-US interval increased the required time to meet the avoidance criterion decreased. The shorter the CS-US interval and the more intense the CS, the shorter the median response latencies observed at the end of the traini...

This paper introduces gyroscopic forces as an tool that can be used in addition to the use of potential forces in the study of collision and convex obstacle avoidance. It makes use of the concepts of a detection shell and a safety shell and shows, in an appropriate context, that collisions are avoided, while at the same time guaranteeing that control objectives determined by a potential functio...

This research tests whether the perception of red in an achievement context evokes avoidance behavior without conscious awareness and also examines the context specificity of the hypothesized red effect. In Experiment 1, participants were briefly shown red or green on the cover of an analogies test that they would ostensibly take (an achievement context) or rate on likability of (a nonachieveme...

Approach and avoidance constitute a basic dimension of all animal behavior. Although a large number of studies have investigated approach and avoidance elicited by specific sensory stimuli, comparatively little is known about default approach biases when stimulus information is absent or reduced. The amygdala is well known to contribute to approach and avoidance behaviors in response to specifi...

BACKGROUND Decades of research have produced overwhelming evidence that tobacco taxes reduce tobacco use and increase government tax revenue. The magnitude and effectiveness of taxes in reducing tobacco use provide an incentive for tobacco users, manufacturers and others, most notably criminal networks, to devise ways to avoid or evade tobacco taxes. Consequently, tobacco tax avoidance and tax ...

This paper proposes a Particle-Filter approach and a set of motion strategies to cooperatively localize a team of three robots. The allocated mission consists on the path following of a closed trajectory and obstacle avoidance in isolated and unstructured scenarios. The localization methodology required for the correct path following relies on distance and orientation measurements among the rob...

In this paper we discuss a robotic task requiring dynamical safety in the face of an intermittent environment. We define and offer examples of this notion. We then construct a dynamically safe composite controller from dynamically safe constituents, and present empirical evidence of its effectiveness. 1. I n t r o d u c t i o n This paper and a companion paper [1] develop an approach to buildin...

Grasping is one of the most important abilities needed for future service robots. In the task of picking up an object from between clutter, traditional robotics approaches would determine a suitable grasping point and then use a movement planner to reach the goal. The planner would require precise and accurate information about the environment and long computation times, both of which are often...