Related papers: Designing robot swarms: a puzzle, a problem, and a…
A major goal in robotics is to enable intelligent mobile robots to operate smoothly in shared human-robot environments. One of the most fundamental capabilities in service of this goal is competent navigation in this ``social" context. As a…
Robots exhibit a rich variety of symmetries arising from their mechanical structure and the properties of their tasks. Although many robotics problems exhibit several symmetries simultaneously, existing approaches typically treat them in…
This work addresses the coordination problem of multiple robots with the goal of finding specific hazardous targets in an unknown area and dealing with them cooperatively. The desired behaviour for the robotic system entails multiple…
Integrating social robots in our group-based society, beyond the technical challenges, requires considering the social group dynamics. Following the results from preliminary exploratory studies on the influence of social robots on group…
Collective animal behaviors are paradigmatic examples of fully decentralized operations involving complex collective computations such as collective turns in flocks of birds or collective harvesting by ants. These systems offer a unique…
This paper proposes a model-based framework to automatically and efficiently design understandable and verifiable behaviors for swarms of robots. The framework is based on the automatic extraction of two distinct models: 1) a neural network…
As humans move toward collaborating with coordinated robot teams, understanding how these teams coordinate and fail is essential for building trust and ensuring safety. However, exposing human collaborators to coordination failures during…
Robot swarms require cohesive collective behaviour to address diverse challenges, including shape formation and decision-making. Existing approaches often treat consensus in discrete and continuous decision spaces as distinct problems. We…
Most of the grand challenges of humanity today involve complex agent-based systems, such as epidemiology, economics or ecology. However, remains as a pending task the challenge of identifying the general principles underlying their…
There are many well-studied swarming algorithms which are often suited to very specific purposes. As mobile sensor networks become increasingly complex, and are comprised of more and more agents, it makes sense to consider swarming…
Studies of human-robot interaction in dynamic and unstructured environments show that as more advanced robotic capabilities are deployed, the need for cooperative competencies to support collaboration with human problem-holders increases.…
Today's distributed and pervasive computing addresses large-scale cyber-physical ecosystems, characterised by dense and large networks of devices capable of computation, communication and interaction with the environment and people. While…
The research community is puzzled with words like skill, action, atomic unit and others when describing robots' capabilities. However, for giving the possibility to integrate capabilities in industrial scenarios, a standardization of these…
In this paper we try to organize machine teaching as a coherent set of ideas. Each idea is presented as varying along a dimension. The collection of dimensions then form the problem space of machine teaching, such that existing teaching…
A key challenge in intelligent robotics is creating robots that are capable of directly interacting with the world around them to achieve their goals. The last decade has seen substantial growth in research on the problem of robot…
The limited energy capacity of individual robotic agents in a swarm often limits the possible cooperative tasks they can perform. In this work, we investigate the problem of covering an unknown connected grid environment (e.g. a maze or…
This paper presents a novel approach that allows a swarm of heterogeneous robots to produce simultaneously segregative and flocking behaviors using only local sensing. These behaviors have been widely studied in swarm robotics and their…
We propose a hierarchical framework for collaborative intelligent systems. This framework organizes research challenges based on the nature of the collaborative activity and the information that must be shared, with each level building on…
The increasing deployment of robots in co-working scenarios with humans has revealed complex safety and efficiency challenges in the computation robot behavior. Movement among humans is one of the most fundamental -- and yet critical --…
Many new methodologies for the control of large-scale multi-agent systems are based on macroscopic representations of the emerging system dynamics, in the form of continuum approximations of large ensembles. These techniques, that are…