EcoBot I is a robot developed in the IAS Lab that uses Microbial Fuel Cells (MFC) as the ‘live engine’ and glucose as the fuel. This prototype robot employs no other form of conventional power supply and it proves the concept of autonomy whilst at the same time performing photo-taxis. Recent experiments conducted in our lab, employing two different techniques, have suggested that the power outp...

The robotics community benefits from common test methods and metrics of performance to focus their research. As a result, many performance tests, competitions, demonstrations and analyses have been devised to measure the autonomy, intelligence, and overall effectiveness of robots. These range from robot soccer (football) to measuring the performance of a robot in computer simulations. However, ...

Research of autonomous mobile robots has mostly emphasized interaction and coordination that are natually inspired from biological behavior of birds, insects, and fish: flocking, foraging, collecting, and sharing. However, most research has been only focused on autonomous behaviors in order to perform robots like animals, whereas it is lacked of determinant to those behaviours: energy. Approach...

The coordinated motion of a group of autonomous mobile robots performing a coordinated task has been of high interest in the last decade. Previous research has shown that one of the main problems in the area is to avoid collisions of the robots with obstacles and other members of the group. In this work, we develop a novel coordination scheme along with a new online collision avoidance algorith...

Underwater survey by a team of autonomous robots brings couple of problems caused mainly by the communication restrictions due to the nature of environment. Communication range and bandwidth are very limited and individual robots can become temporarily inaccessible. To allow robots’ efficient operation in such environment architecture of control part of autonomous robot and new algorithms for d...

66 AI MAGAZINE Robots, and therefore roboticists, have been a part of the agents community from its auspicious beginnings in the Autonomous Agents series of conferences, and continuing with the merger into the Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) conferences. Today, there is a resurgent interest and recognition of the importance of robotics research framed within areas of research f...

With the services that autonomous robots are to provide becoming more demanding, the states that the robots have to estimate become more complex. In this article, we develop and analyze a probabilistic, vision-based state estimation method for individual, autonomous robots. This method enables a team of mobile robots to estimate their joint positions in a known environment and track the positio...