Related papers: Making High-Performance Robots Safe and Easy to Us…
The Michigan Robotics MBot is a low-cost mobile robot platform that has been used to train over 1,400 students in autonomous navigation since 2014 at the University of Michigan and our collaborating colleges. The MBot platform was designed…
Robots state of insecurity is onstage. There is an emerging concern about major robot vulnerabilities and their adverse consequences. However, there is still a considerable gap between robotics and cybersecurity domains. For the purpose of…
Robotics simulation plays an important role in the design, development, and verification and validation of robotic systems. Recent studies have shown that simulation may be used as a cheaper, safer, and more reliable alternative to manual,…
Delicate industrial insertion tasks (e.g., PC board assembly) remain challenging for industrial robots. The challenges include low error tolerance, delicacy of the components, and large task variations with respect to the components to be…
The advantage of modular self-reconfigurable robot systems is their flexibility, but this advantage can only be realized if appropriate configurations (shapes) and behaviors (controlling programs) can be selected for a given task. In this…
There are many benefits in providing formal specifications for our software. However, teaching students to do this is not always easy as courses on formal methods are often experienced as dry by students. This paper presents a game called…
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) focus on manifold subjects, ranging from social sciences over languages to technical skills, and use different means to train the respective skills. MOOCs that are teaching programming skills aim to…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
An outstanding challenge for the widespread deployment of robotic systems like autonomous vehicles is ensuring safe interaction with humans without sacrificing performance. Existing safety methods often neglect the robot's ability to learn…
Teachers face several challenges when presenting the fundamental concepts of programming in the classroom. Several tools are introduced to give a visual dimension to support the learning process. These tools rely on code blocks, easily…
The increasing number of robots in home environments leads to an emerging coexistence between humans and robots. Robots undertake common tasks and support the residents in their everyday life. People appreciate the presence of robots in…
This paper describes a framework called MaestROB. It is designed to make the robots perform complex tasks with high precision by simple high-level instructions given by natural language or demonstration. To realize this, it handles a…
Introductory programming courses often emphasize mastering syntax and basic constructs before progressing to more complex and interesting programs. This bottom-up approach can be frustrating for novices, shifting the focus away from problem…
Programming is a craft which often demands that learners engage in a significantly high level of individual practice and experimentation in order to acquire basic competencies. However, practice behaviours can be undermined during the early…
This work investigates the potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to tackle robot motion planning challenges in the dynamic RoboCup Small Size League (SSL). Using a heuristic control approach, we evaluate RL's effectiveness in…
For the task with complicated manipulation in unstructured environments, traditional hand-coded methods are ineffective, while reinforcement learning can provide more general and useful policy. Although the reinforcement learning is able to…
Human-Robot Teams offer the flexibility needed for partial automation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They will thus be an integral part of Factories of the Future. Our research targets a particularly flexible teaming mode,…
The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to…
Children learn though play. We introduce the analogous idea of learning programs through play. In this approach, a program induction system (the learner) is given a set of tasks and initial background knowledge. Before solving the tasks,…
Programming industrial robots is not very intuitive, and the programmer has to be a domain expert for e.g. welding and programming to know how the task is optimally executed. For SMEs such employees are not affordable, nor cost-effective.…