Some robotic applications like vacuum cleaners require the robot to travel to each and every spot in the room while avoiding obstacles whose position may or may not be known. These obstacles may not always be in the same position. The robot itself may or may not have a map of the room. In the latter case, it has to rely on its sensors to navigate. It also may not know its absolute position in t...

We investigate teams of complete autonomous agents that can collaborate towards achieving precise objectives in an adversarial dynamic environment. We have pursued this work in the context of robotic soccer both in simulation and with real physical robots. We brieey present these two frameworks emphasizing their diierent technical challenges. Creating eeective members of a team is a challenging...

Two main trends are emerging in the area of home and service robotics. The classical one aims at the development of a single skilled servant robot, able to perform complex tasks in a passive environment. The second, more recent trend aims at the achievement of domestic tasks through the cooperation of a network of simpler robotic devices pervasively embedded in the environment. This paper contr...

Robotic harvesting of crops has the potential to disrupt current agricultural practices. A key element to enabling robotic harvesting is to safely remove the crop from the plant which often involves locating and cutting the peduncle, the part of the crop that attaches it to the main stem of the plant. In this paper we present a comparative study of two methods for performing peduncle detection....

Abs t rac t Much of the focus of the research effort in path planning for mobile robots has centred on the problem of finding a path from a start location to a goal location, while minimising one or more parameters such as length of path, energy consumption or journey time. A path of complete coverage is a planned path in which a robot sweeps all areas of free space in an environment in a syste...

Robots are increasingly present in modern industry and also in everyday life. Their applications range from health-related situations, for assistance to elderly people or in surgical operations, to automatic and driver-less vehicles (on wheels or flying) or for driving assistance. Recently, an interest towards robotics applied in agriculture and gardening has arisen, with applications to automa...

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) has been a very important requirement for the purpose of rescue of patients in emergency. But unavailability of trained technicians at the time of need has been a problem. Robotic systems capable of performing the cardiopulmonary resuscitation can be a potential solution. In this paper, a design of robotic system for CPR and its optimization has been presente...

The video shows a robotic wheelchair autonomously driven by a sensor-based navigation system in an office scenario. The objective of the experiment displayed is to reach a location out of a room. This is achieved by a sensor-based motion system composed by three different modules: a modeler of the environment, a tactical planner and an obstacle avoidance method. The integration of these modules...

Some older adults require assistance with ambulation due to physical mobility limitations. Others lack the cognitive ability, either alone or in combination with physical impairment, to get where they need to go. Investigation of older adults' gait speed, social interaction, and responsiveness to a robot during ambulation is part of the Nursebot Project, a unique collaboration of health care pr...

This paper presents a novel developmental learning approach for hand-eye coordination in an autonomous robotic system. Robotic hand-eye coordination plays an important role in dealing with realtime environments. Under the approach, infant developmental patterns are introduced to build our robot’s learning system. The method works by first constructing a brain-like computational structure to con...