Data is being published by both the public and private sectors and covers a diverse set of domains ranging from life sciences to media or government data. An example is the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud which is potentially a gold mine for organizations and individuals who are trying to leverage external data sources in order to produce more informed business decisions. Considering the significa...

Robots have entered our domestic lives, but yet, little is known about their impact on the home. This paper takes steps towards addressing this omission, by reporting results from an empirical study of iRobot’s RoombaTM, a vacuuming robot. Our findings suggest that, by developing intimacy to the robot, our participants were able to derive increased pleasure from cleaning, and expended effort to...

Robotics can be seen as a field of computer science still in its infancy. In recent years there has been a tremendous explosion in innovation, both in hardware and software. The dynamic nature of robotics as well as the necessity for physical hardware presents a unique challenge for those wishing to educate the next generation of roboticists. This paper presents the technical aspects of Brown U...

The past two decades have seen a rise in autonomous robots households. In particular, robotic vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers become much more accessible mainstream are the most popular domestic service robots. (Roomba Landroid trade names for iRobot's WORX's mower, respectively.) As with many smart home technologies, an often-touted benefit is that they can save energy-and informal analyses pos...

Linked Open Data (LOD) has emerged as one of the largest collections of interlinked datasets on the web. In order to benefit from this mine of data, one needs to access descriptive information about each dataset (or metadata). However, the heterogeneous nature of data sources reflects directly on the data quality as these sources often contain inconsistent as well as misinterpreted and incomple...

One of the major limitations with many off-the-shelf, inexpensive robotics platforms is the lack of a simple way to localize the robot. This is an even bigger issue for educational purposes because the cost of a complete solution is usually an important concern. Many great educational projects utilizing a robot become infeasible because of this limitation. This paper attempts to bridge that gap...

Remote laboratories provide a new way of supplementing traditional laboratories by permitting laboratory facilities to be utilized from any place and at any time. This paper focuses mainly on the customization of two engineering systems to be controlled and manipulated from remote locations and finally to integrate them within a remote laboratory facility. The systems are Roomba Create and a sm...

The Roomba rolls around your house and vacuums the carpets. Early models were known to get stuck in corners or to end up running in circles. If the robot has unlimited memory then you could just give it a map of the room and it would never get trapped or confused. In practice, the robot has limited memory, and for AI programmers, the less used the better. We want to model this problem mathemati...

In this paper, we have successfully demonstrated the semantic mapping and motion planning experiments on Turtlebot Robot using Microsoft Kinect in ROS environment. Moreover, we have also performed the comparative studies on various sampling based motion planning algorithms with Turtlebot in Open Motion Planning Library. Our comparative analysis revealed that Expansive Space Trees (EST) surmount...

Common Law has always recognised a person’s house as his or her castle; an innermost sanctum where one’s right to be left alone is protected in all but the most extreme of situations. But the so-called “Digital Home”, instrumented, monitored and regulated by a so-called “Internet of Things” may very drastically change this, turning every last detail of every last personal and private activity i...