Nature’s self-organizing teams have long inspired engineering researchers. Imitating birds and fish, researchers built swarms that could keep formation via elegant decentralized control algorithms. Inspired by ants, they applied formation keeping to carrying loads as a mobile robot team. In this work, we further specialize this collaborative manipulation to manipulating teammates, thereby creat...

Human operators of real-world co-robots, such as excavator, require extensive experience to skillfully handle these complicated machines in uncertain safetycritical environments. We consider the problem of human-robot collaborative learning and task execution, where efficient human-robot interaction is critical to safely and efficiently accomplish complex tasks in uncertain environments. Our co...

To focus on the research issues surrounding collaborative behavior in multiple mobile-robotic systems, a great amount of low-level infrastructure is required. To facilitate our on-going research into multi-robot systems, we have developed RAVE, a software framework that provides a Real And Virtual Environment for running and managing multiple heterogeneous mobile-robot systems. This framework s...

SLAM systems are mainly applied for robot navigation while research on feasibility for motion planning with SLAM for tasks like bin-picking, is scarce. Accurate 3D reconstruction of objects and environments is important for planning motion and computing optimal gripper pose to grasp objects. In this work, we propose the methods to analyze the accuracy of a 3D environment reconstructed using a L...

computer-supported collaborative learning (cscl) is a new trend in educational sciences. this study investigates how knowledge sharing and transferring can be facilitated by using cscl in a problem-solving setting. intervention of research is education regarding sustainable water resources management (swrm) by computer-supported collaborative learning (cscl). the purpose of this research was to...

An analytical model of Human-Robot (H-R) coordination is presented for a Human-Robot system executing a collaborative task in which a high level of synchronization among the agents is desired. The influencing parameters and decision variables that affect the waiting time of the collaborating agents were analyzed. The performance of the model was evaluated based on the costs of the waiting times...

We consider “collaborative control” systems, where multiple sources share control of a single robot. These sources could come from multiple sensors (sensor fusion), multiple control processes (subsumption), or multiple human operators. Reports suggest that such systems are highly fault tolerant, even with large numbers of sources. In this paper we develop a formal model, modeling sources with f...

This paper illustrates through a practical example an integration of a humanoid robotic architecture, with an open-platform collaborative working environment called BSCW (Be Smart Cooperate Worldwide). BSCW is primarily designed to advocate a futuristic shared workspace system for humans. We exemplify how a complex robotic system (such as a humanoid robot) can be integrated as a proactive colla...

We present an experimental testbed for probing social aspects of human-robot group interaction using a collaborative game. Our testbed, Sheep and Wolves, allows a human user to play as a game piece, with a group of robots as peers, all engaged in collaborative gameplay on a large physical game board, using mixed reality and cartoon artbased techniques to communicate and discuss moves. The paper...