Scaling up robot swarms to collectives of hundreds or even thousands without sacrificing sensing, processing, and locomotion capabilities is a challenging problem. Low-cost robots are potentially scalable, but the majority of existing systems have limited capabilities, and these limitations substantially constrain the type of experiments that could be performed by robotics researchers. As an al...

Living creatures, like walking animals, have found fascinating solutions for the problem of locomotion control. Their movements show the impression of elegance including versatile, energy-efficient, and adaptable locomotion. During the last few decades, roboticists have tried to imitate such natural properties with artificial legged locomotion systems by using different approaches including mac...

In this paper we present an approach to the gaze stabilization problem using Adaptive Frequency Oscillators to learn the frequency, phase and amplitude of the optical flow and generate compensatory commands during robot locomotion. Assuming periodic and nearly sine shaped motion of the robot, the system successfully stabilizes the gaze of the robot, whether the robot itself is moving, or an ext...

Analysis and simulations are performed for a simpliied model of a commercially available variant of the skateboard, known as the Snakeboard 1. Although the model exhibits basic gait patterns seen in a large number of locomotion problems, the analysis tools currently available do not apply to this problem. The diiculty lies primarily in the way in which the non-holonomic constraints enter into t...

This paper presents an automatic turns detection and annotation technique which works from unlabeled captured locomotion. Motion annotation is required by several motion capture editing techniques. Detection of turns is made difficult because of the oscillatory nature of the human locomotion. Our contribution is to address this problem by analyzing the trajectory of the center of mass of the hu...

Grounding robot representations is an important problem in Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we show how a new grounding framework guided the development of an improved locomotion engine [3] for the AIBO. The improvements stemmed from higher quality representations that were grounded better than those in the previous system [1]. Since the AIBO is more grounded under the new locomotion engi...