Tall fescue (Schedonorus arundinaceus (Schreb.) Dumort.) is often managed with a cutting height ranging from 70 to 100 mm in ornamental lawns. Some autonomous mowers have been specifically designed maintain mowing the same range. Generally, operate by following random trajectories, and substantial overlapping needed obtain full coverage of working area. In case tall grass, this may cause lodgin...

In this paper an autonomous intervention robotic task to learn the skill of grasping and turning a valve is described. To resolve this challenge a set of different techniques are proposed, each one realizing a specific task and sending information to the others in a Hardware-In-Loop (HIL) simulation. To improve the estimation of the valve position, an Extended Kalman Filter is designed. Also to...

are turned upside down by innovations. The years of research on robotics and multiagent systems are coming together to provide just such a disruption to the material-handling industry. While autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) have been used to move material within warehouses since the 1950s, they have been used primarily to transport very large, very heavy objects like rolls of uncut paper or en...

Mobile robots need their position in the workspace. A standard GPS will allow an absolute positioning of the robot in the field, but the position accuracy is not enough to perform unmanned field task. This paper proposes a system for robot localization based on landmark bearings measured by the robot. Since the equipment setup is very simple our proposed technique would be useful for real-world...

The design of robotic systems that are capable of sophisticated social behavior such as cooperation, compromise, negotiation, and altruism, requires more complex mathematical models than are afforded by the classical mechanisms for making value judgments and decisions. A new concept of multi-agent satisficing, defined in terms of relative effectiveness and efficiency, is an alternative to class...

1 Thimann, K. V., Ann. Rev. Biochem., 4, 545 (1935). 2 Thimann, K. V., Proc. Kon. Akad. Wetensch. Amsterdam, 38, 896 (1935); Went, F. W., and Haagen-Smit, A. J., Ibid.. 38, 852 (1935). I Kogl, F., Haagen-Smit, A. J., and Erxleben, H., Zeit. Physiol. Chem., 228, 90 (1934). 4 Lane, R. H., Am. Jour. Bot., in press. ' Thimann, K. V., Ihid., in press. 6 Snow, R., New Phytologist, 34, 347 (1935). 7 C...

Face recognition has been a huge area of research over the past 25 years [Gao and Leung, 2002]. However the field is still highly unsolved, largely due to variations in pose, illumination and expression. In this paper we propose using pose recognition to solve the first of the face recognition variation problems and simultaneously use both recognised pose and face information to control a robot...

In the last years, several robotic walking aids to assist elderly users with mobility constraints and thus to react to the growing number of elderly persons in our society have been developed. In order to ensure good support for the user, the robotic walker should adapt to the motion of the user while at the same time not losing the target out of sight. Even though some of the existing active r...

HELSINKI 2005 2 This thesis is based on the following papers, which are referred to by their Roman numerals: I Munsterhjelm, R. 1997: The aquatic macrophyte vegetation of flads and gloes, S coast of Finland. – Acta Bot. Fennica 157: 1–68. II Munsterhjelm, R.: What does the vegetation map tell us? – A methodological study and a visual analysis of the macroscopic water vegetation of shallow brack...

Current underwater crawling vehicles could benefit by using rotating head sonar data to avoid collisions with obstacles. We have developed and optimized a fuzzy logic controller using software for simulation of an underwater environment. The optimization results show near an order of magnitude increase in performance over both straight line and lawnmower search patterns with relatively small ch...