Small humanoid robots are becoming a more and more popular device for entertainment. While the literature shows many advanced techniques for the development of humanoid robot motions, for example motion retargeting, most of the commercially available products only provide a low level interface where each motion is described in terms of keyframes for which each joint angle is defined. In this pa...

A computer language is a very general form of representing and specifying an autonomous agent's behavior. The task of planning feasible actions could then simply be reduced to an instance of automatic programming. We have evaluated the use of an evolutionary technique for automatic programming called Genetic Programming (GP) to directly control a miniature robot. To our knowledge, this is the r...

Programming robots is a complicated and timeconsuming task. A robot is essentially a real-time, distributed embedded system. Often, control and communication paths within the system are tightly coupled to the actual physical configuration of the robot. Thus, programming a robot is a very challenging task for domain experts who do not have a dedicated background in robotics. In this paper we pre...

With the high adaptability requirements for the software that controls our robots, text code based programming, such as in C++, can cause significant time delays, especially when poorly documented. Graphical programming, a new paradigm in programming, through LabVIEW, can provide a solution with a shorter learning period, faster code implementation, and easier maintainability. We have developed...

Currently, most robot programming is done either by manual programming or by the "teach-by-showing" method using a teach pendant. Both of these methods have been found to have several drawbacks. We propose a novel method to program a robot, the assembly-plan-fromobservation (APO) method. The APO method aims to build a system that has the capability of observing a human performing an assembly ta...

This paper proposes logic programs as a specification for robot control. These provide a formal specification of what an agent should do depending on what it senses, and its previous sensory inputs and actions. We show how to axiomatise reactive agents, events as an interface between continuous and discrete time, and persistence, as well as axiomatising integration and differentiation over time...

As robots enter the human environment and come in contact with inexperienced users, they need to be able to interact with users in a multi-modal fashion—keyboard and mouse are no longer acceptable as the only input modalities. This paper introduces a novel approach to program a robot interactively through a multi-modal interface. The key characteristic of this approach is that the user can prov...

Genetic Programming was used to create the vision subsystem of a reactive obstacle avoidance system for an autonomous mobile robot. The representation of algorithms was specifically chosen to capture the spirit of existing, hand written vision algorithms. Traditional computer vision operators such as Sobel gradient magnitude, median filters and the Moravec interest operator were combined arbitr...

Although a few robots such as vacuum cleaning robots (Jones, 2006; Zhang et al., 2006), lawn mowing robots (Husqvarna; Friendlyrobotics), and some toy robots (Takara; Hasbro) have single functions or perform simple tasks, almost all other service robots perform diverse and complex tasks. Such robots share their work domains with humans, with whom they must constantly interact. In fact, the comp...

The goal of developing algorithms for programming robots by demonstration is to create an easy way of programming robots such that it can be accomplished by anyone. When a demonstrator teaches a task to a robot, he/she shows some ways of fulfilling the task, but not all the possibilities. The robot must then be able to reproduce the task even when unexpected perturbations occur. In this case, i...