The past two decades have seen a rise in autonomous robots households. In particular, robotic vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers become much more accessible mainstream are the most popular domestic service robots. (Roomba Landroid trade names for iRobot's WORX's mower, respectively.) As with many smart home technologies, an often-touted benefit is that they can save energy-and informal analyses pos...

Source reduction efforts have helped to keep waste generation rates under control. The state of the economy has a direct impact on consumption and waste generation. With the strong economic growth that has occurred throughout the 1990's, waste generation has continued to increase. Despite this, the total per capita waste generation has remained unchanged from 1997 to 1998. On-site yard waste co...

Remote and autonomous operation of robotic platforms is revolutionizing the way in which work is done and information is gathered. Through the removal of the human element, costs decrease, quality of work increases, and continuous operation is achievable at little to no additional cost. Remote control offers almost all individuals regardless of physical limitations the ability to operate machin...

Advancements in robotic technology are opening up the opportunity to integrate robot workers into the labor force to increase productivity and efficiency. However, removing control from human-workers for the sake of efficiency may create resistance from the human workers, preventing this technology from being successfully integrated into the workplace. We describe our ongoing work developing an...

The integration of solutions to small problems is nec essary to solve larger ones However this integration does not need the consensus of the entire robotics community Individual research groups can integrate the necessary pieces to build solutions for larger prob lems Community wide standardization may lead to research stagnation To address the issues of integra tion ve of the many research e ...

Abstract Insufficient intake of organic matter into the soil, non-compliance with crop rotations result in soil degradation. Only due to use mineral nutrition, it is impossible maintain a high level fertility. To compensate for lack humus, most optimal green fertilizers. The costs producing and applying cover crops are significantly less than using In terms peasant farms conditions Tambov regio...

We present a method for navigating an autonomous agent based on the textures present in an environment. Specifically, the autonomous agent in question is that of a robotic lawn mower. If we can successfully differentiate the textures of the cut and uncut lawn surfaces, then we can track the boundary between them and mow in a pattern as a human would. The system uses the wavelet transform as the...