Because of the timing, complexity, and asynchronicity challenges common in modular robot software we have recently begun to explore new programming models for modular robot ensembles. In this paper we apply two of those models to a metamodule-based shape planning algorithm and comment on the differences between the two approaches. Our results suggest that declarative programming can provide sev...

The Programming by Demonstration paradigm promises to reduce the complexity incurred in programming robot tasks. Its aim is to let robot systems learn new behaviors from a human operator demonstration. In this paper, we argue that while providing demonstrations in the real environment enables teaching of general tasks, for tasks whose essential features are known a priori demonstrating in a vir...

Although there is a vast bibliography on robot control, only in recent year a lot of attention is placed on how to teach control to children and the consequent problems related to this programming activity. In fact, many are the design problems in relation with a good programming activity in robotics. In this paper, we analyse some of these problems. In particular: • programming the robot contr...

We have created a simulated environment in Matlab that models a 2D 2-link brachiating robot using Lagrangian dynamics. We then developed a dynamic programming based control scheme to allow the robot to perform swingup and continuous contact brachiating swing.

Despite substantial advances in robotics technologies, robots continue to be underutilized. This trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future unless end users can better program their own robots. Robot programming systems must be developed that allow end users (who often lack technological expertise) to quickly program their own robots to perform customized tasks in environments of th...

The special issue collects a subset of the best papers presented at the ICRA’05 workshop on the Social Mechanisms of Robot Programming by Demonstration. The workshop took place on April 21st 2005 in Barcelona, Spain, at the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’05). Eleven of the best papers presented at the workshop were subsequently submitted for peer review before publication in t...

The Tekkotsu “crew” is a collection of interacting software components designed to relieve a programmer of much of the burden of specifying low-level robot behaviors. Using this abstract approach to robot programming we can teach beginning roboticists to develop interesting robot applications with relatively little effort.

We have implemented a software environment that permits a small mobile robot to be programmed using the Scheme programming languagee3]. The environment supports incremental modiications to running programs and interactive debugging using a distributed read-evaluate-print loop. To ensure that the programming environment consumes a minimum of the robot's scarce on-board resources, it separates th...

A virtual robot teaching that consists of human demonstration and motion-intention analysis in a virtual reality environment is an advanced technology of automatic programming for multi-fingered robots. As the type of virtual hand model displayed on-screen, a human-hand model is better than a robot-hand model in terms of teaching time and a stable manipulation of virtual object. However it may ...

Robots, especially human-form robots that we call humanoids have been seen in some technological scene with interest for years. There were two major approaches to realize behaviors of these robots. One is to teach explicitly the robot what to perform by such as programming. And the other is to let the robot figure out what to do for oneself by some learning method such as reinforcement learning...