As the field of robotics are advancing, robotics education needs to consider technological advances and societal level of interest. Realizing computer games in robotic platforms is one such technological advance for educating students in robotics science. Realizing computer games in robotics environment is still a challenge due to high investment factor in developing robot models. However the e...

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in the potential benefits of ‘intelligent’ autonomous machines such as robots. Honda’s Asimo humanoid robot, iRobot’s Roomba robot vacuum cleaner and Google’s driverless cars have fired the imagination of the general public, and social media buzz with speculation about a utopian world of helpful robot assistants or the coming robot apocalypse! How...

Over 30 years ago, TV shows from The Jetsons to Star Trek suggested that by the millennium’s end computers would read, talk, recognize, walk, converse, think, and maybe even feel. People do these things easily, so how hard could it be? However, in general we still don’t talk to our computers, cars, or houses, and they still don’t talk to us. The Roomba, a successful household robot, is a functi...

The early 21st century is witnessing a rapid advance in social robots. From vacuum cleaning robots (like the Roomba), to entertainment robots (like the Pleo), to robot pets (like KittyCat), to robot dolls (like Baby Alive), to therapy robots (like Paro), and many others, social robots are rapidly finding applications in households and elder care settings. In 2006, the number of service robots w...

This book is an edited collection of chapters on artificial companions (ACs) resulting from a workshop. It purports to discuss the philosophical and ethical issues associated with ACs, what ACs should be like and how to construct them, and to provide examples of special-purpose ACs. Table 1 shows the chapters of the book and their respective authors. When I bought a vacuum-cleaning robot called...

Searching in a geometric space is an active area of research, predating computer technology. The applications are varied ranging from robotics, to search-andrescue operations in the high seas [24, 23] as well as in land, such as in an avalanche [5] or an office space [12, 7, 13], to scheduling of heuristic algorithms for solvers searching an abstract solution space for a specific solution [16, ...

A t the Museum of Sex in New York City, artifi cial-intelligence researcher David Levy projected a mock image on a screen of a smiling bride in a wedding dress holding hands with a short robot groom. " Why not marry a robot? Look at this happy couple, " he said to a chuckling crowd. When Levy was then asked whether anyone who would want to marry a robot was deluded, his face grew serious. " If ...

A system is presented for the haptic exploration of objects in a household environment. Haptic properties are acquired using a passive, deformable sensor tip mounted on a platform. The sensor deformation is measured visually, allowing for a flexible and low-cost design. Navigation of simple robots, such as vacuum cleaners, is improved by active manipulation. Simple service robots for households...

Our work addresses issues related to the cohabitation of service robots and people in unstructured environments. We propose new planning techniques to empower robot means-end reasoning with the capability of taking into account human intentions and preferences. We also address the problem of human activity recognition in instrumented environments. We employ a constraint-based approach to realiz...

This article describes a novel mobile wall-climbing robot named City-Climber that has the capabilities to move on the ground, climb walls, walk on ceilings, and transit between different surfaces. Unlike the traditional climbing robots using magnetic devices and vacuum suction techniques, and the robots inspired by the gecko foot, the City-Climber robot is based on aerodynamic attraction which ...