Related papers: A representation of robotic behaviors using compon…

The safe operation of an autonomous system is a complex endeavor, one pivotal element being its decision-making. Decision-making logic can formally be analyzed using model checking or other formal verification approaches. Yet, the…

Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with…

Heterogeneous Robot Teams can provide a wide range of capabilities and therefore significant benefits when handling a mission. However, they also require new approaches to capability and mission definition that are not only suitable to…

For widespread deployment in domains characterized by partial observability, non-deterministic actions and unforeseen changes, robots need to adapt sensing, processing and interaction with humans to the tasks at hand. While robots typically…

Complexity has been a recurrent research topic in cellular automata because they represent systems where complex behaviors emerge from simple local interactions. A significant amount of previous research has been conducted proposing…

The adoption of the distributed paradigm has allowed applications to increase their scalability, robustness and fault tolerance, but it has also complicated their structure, leading to an exponential growth of the applications'…

Distributed programs are hard to get right because they are required to be open, scalable, long-running, and tolerant to faults. In particular, the recent approaches to distributed software based on (micro-)services where different services…

Testing is a significant aspect of software development. As systems become complex and their use becomes critical to the security and the function of society, the need for testing methodologies that ensure reliability and detect faults as…

Nature provides us with abundant examples of how large numbers of individuals can make decisions without the coordination of a central authority. Social insects, birds, fishes, and many other living collectives, rely on simple interaction…

Using sensors as a means to achieve self-awareness and artificial intelligence for decision-making, may be a way to make complex systems self-adaptive, autonomous and resilient. Investigating the combination of distributed artificial…

Taking inspiration from how the brain coordinates multiple learning systems is an appealing strategy to endow robots with more flexibility. One of the expected advantages would be for robots to autonomously switch to the least costly system…

We describe some progress towards a new common framework for model driven engineering, based on behavioral programming. The tool we have developed unifies almost all of the work done in behavioral programming so far, under a common set of…

Animal and robotic collective behaviours can exhibit complex dynamics that require multi-level descriptions. Here, we are interested in developing a multi-level modeling framework for the use of robots in studies about animal collective…

In the context of teleoperation, arbitration refers to deciding how to blend between human and autonomous robot commands. We present a reinforcement learning solution that learns an optimal arbitration strategy that allocates more control…

A Multi Robot System (MRS) is the infrastructure of an intelligent cyberphysical system, where the robots understand the need of the human, and hence cooperate together to fulfill this need. Modeling an MRS is a crucial aspect of designing…

Following previous work on the automated deployment orchestration of component based applications, where orchestrations are expressed in terms of behaviours satisfying component interface functional dependences, we develop a formal model…

The specification and validation of robotics applications require bridging the gap between formulating requirements and systematic testing. This often involves manual and error-prone tasks that become more complex as requirements, design,…

A limitation for collaborative robots (cobots) is their lack of ability to adapt to human partners, who typically exhibit an immense diversity of behaviors. We present an autonomous framework as a cobot's real-time decision-making mechanism…

While robots are increasingly integrated into the built environment, little is known how their qualities can meaningfully influence our spaces to facilitate enjoyable and agreeable interaction, rather than robotic settings that are driven…

Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…