Abstract Assistive robots operate in complex environments and presence of human beings, but the interaction between them can be affected by several factors, which may lead to undesired outcomes: wrong sensor readings, unexpected environmental conditions, or algorithmic errors represent just a few examples possible scenarios. When safety user is not only an option must guaranteed, feasible solut...

Autonomous robots need to perceive and represent their environments and act accordingly. Using simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods, robots can build maps of the environment which are efficient for localization and path planning as long as the environment remains unchanged. However, facility logistics environments are not static because pallets and other obstacles are stored tem...

Abstract Landmarks are accepted as one of the vital elements in both virtual and real environments during wayfinding tasks. This paper provides an overview existing literature on selection landmarks mostly large-scale urban outdoors by discussing two main aspects landmarks: visibility salience. Environments layouts used previous studies, different tasks given to people findings explained compar...

Content assist systems and code completion are nicely accessible in integrated development environments (IDEs). Using multiple data sources and performing sophisticated completion in several editors is quite common. However, no such supporting system exists for modeling environments, e.g., a completion mechanism in class diagrams is only existent for textual items like names, if at all. We desi...

This paper presents the usage of the agile and Scrum methods for SW projects in extremely dynamic environments. It describes the benefits of using Scrum process in fast changing environments and addressing the most crucial problems described by IT project surveys. The paper is focused on extremely short projects and delivery times counted on days and hours and changing the Scrum process accordi...

In crowded multi-agent navigation environments, the motion of the agents is significantly constrained by the motion of the nearby agents. This makes planning paths very difficult and leads to inefficient global motion. To address this problem, we propose a new distributed approach to coordinate the motions of agents in crowded environments. With our approach, agents take into account the veloci...

Mobile Applications are programs which are able to move themselves between hosts on the network. Sentient Applications are programs which can exploit the existence of pervasive networked sensor devices to observe their environment and react accordingly. We believe that properly designed and constrained Sentient Mobile Applications provide a good foundation for building applications for pervasiv...

Robotic agents can greatly be benefited from the integration of perceptual learning in order to monitor and adapt to changing environments. To be effective in complex unstructured environments, robots have to perceive the environment and adapt accordingly. In this paper it is discussed a biology inspired approach based on the adaptive resonance theory (ART) and implemented on an KUKA KR15 indus...

We consider the task of developing an adaptive autonomous agent that can interact with non-stationary environments. Traditional learning approaches such as Reinforcement Learning assume stationary characteristics over the course of the problem, and are therefore unable to learn the dynamically changing settings correctly. We introduce a novel adaptive framework that can detect dynamic changes d...

OBJECTIVE To describe how the tobacco industry used the "accommodation" message to mount an aggressive and effective worldwide campaign to recruit hospitality associations, such as restaurant associations, to serve as the tobacco industry's surrogate in fighting against smoke-free environments. METHODS We analysed tobacco industry documents publicly available on the internet as a result of li...