Within the context of human/multi-robot teams, the “help me help you” paradigm offers different opportunities. A team of robots can help a human operator accomplish a goal, and a human operator can help a team of robots accomplish the same, or a different, goal. Two scenarios are examined here. First, a team of robots helps a human operator search a remote facility by recognizing objects of int...

This paper — a summary of a keynote address given at the Robocup 2003 symposium — argues i) that mobile robotics research would benefit from a theoretical understanding of robot-environment interaction, ii) that independent replication and verification of experimental results should become common practice within robotics research, and iii) that quantitative measures of robot behaviour are neede...

The market of domestic service robots, and especially vacuum cleaners, has kept growing during the past decade. According to the International Federation of Robotics, more than one million units were sold worldwide in 2010. Currently, there is no in-depth analysis of the energetic impact of the introduction of this technology on the mass market. This topic is of prime importance in our energy-d...

In recent years, pseudospectral (PS) methods have been successfully applied to solve a rich number of trajectory optimization problems arising in aerospace application. Motivated by the success of this approach, we consider the problem of generating minimum-time trajectories for unmanned ground vehicles. Shapes of arbitrary number, size and configuration are modelled in the form of path constra...