A robot that is to assist humans in everyday activities should not only be efficient, but also choose actions that are understandable for a person. One characteristic of human task achievement is to recognize and exploit opportunities as they appear in dynamically changing environments. In this paper we explore opportunistic behavior for robots in the context of pick and place tasks with human ...

Manipulation tasks are sequential in nature. Grasp selection approaches that take into account the constraints at each task step are critical, since they allow to both (1) Identify grasps that likely require simple arm motions through the whole task and (2) To discard grasps that, although feasible to achieve at earlier steps, might not be executable at later stages due to goal task constraints...

A principal’s attention is repeatedly sought by multiple agents, each eager for his ideas to be implemented. An idea’s quality stochastically affects the principal’s profit, and agents’ abilities to generate good ideas may be private information. The principal is unable to review proposals before choosing one each period. She can provide incentives only through her selection rule among proposal...

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The most important element of corrosion protection in industrial conditions is the protective coating system. However, selecting right can often be a real problem due to sheer number manufacturers and their products on market. A quantitative approach based data mining technique used analyze obtained multi-site exposure has been proposed. This was demonstrated by example selection system protect...