Refine
H-BRS Bibliography
- yes (32)
Departments, institutes and facilities
Document Type
- Conference Object (25)
- Article (3)
- Part of a Book (3)
- Preprint (1)
Year of publication
Language
- English (32)
Keywords
- Robotics (3)
- Human-Robot Interaction (2)
- domestic robots (2)
- robot competitions (2)
- Affordances (1)
- Benchmarking (1)
- Coloured pointclouds (1)
- Domain Expert (1)
- Domestic robots (1)
- Domestic service robots (1)
The development of robot control programs is a complex task. Many robots are different in their electrical and mechanical structure which is also reflected in the software. Specific robot software environments support the program development, but are mainly text-based and usually applied by experts in the field with profound knowledge of the target robot. This paper presents a graphical programming environment which aims to ease the development of robot control programs. In contrast to existing graphical robot programming environments, our approach focuses on the composition of parallel action sequences. The developed environment allows to schedule independent robot actions on parallel execution lines and provides mechanism to avoid side-effects of parallel actions. The developed environment is platform-independent and based on the model-driven paradigm. The feasibility of our approach is shown by the application of the sequencer to a simulated service robot and a robot for educational purpose.
Motivation is a key ingredient for learning: Only if the learner is motivated, successful learning is possible. Educational robotics has proven to be an excellent tool for motivating students at all ages from 8 to 80. Robot competitions for kids, like RoboCupJunior, are instrumental to sustain motivation over a significant period of time. This increases the chances that the learner acquires more in-depth knowledge about the subject area and develops a genuine interest in the field.
We propose an artificial slime mould model (ASMM) inspired by the plasmodium of Physarum polucephalum (P. polucephalum). ASMM consists of plural slimes, and each slime shares energy via a tube with neighboring slimes. Outer slimes sense their environment and conform to it. Outer slimes periodically transmit information about their surrounding environment via a contraction wave to inner slimes. Thus, ASMM shows how slimes can sense a better environment even if that environment is not adjacent to the slimes. The slimes subsequently can move in the direction of an attractant.
Service robots performing complex tasks involving people in houses or public environments are becoming more and more common, and there is a huge interest from both the research and the industrial point of view. The RoCKIn@Home challenge has been designed to compare and evaluate different approaches and solutions to tasks related to the development of domestic and service robots. RoCKIn@Home competitions have been designed and executed according to the benchmarking methodology developed during the project and received very positive feedbacks from the participating teams. Tasks and functionality benchmarks are explained in detail.
RoCKIn@Work was focused on benchmarks in the domain of industrial robots. Both task and functionality benchmarks were derived from real world applications. All of them were part of a bigger user story painting the picture of a scaled down real world factory scenario. Elements used to build the testbed were chosen from common materials in modern manufacturing environments. Networked devices, machines controllable through a central software component, were also part of the testbed and introduced a dynamic component to the task benchmarks. Strict guidelines on data logging were imposed on participating teams to ensure gathered data could be automatically evaluated. This also had the positive effect that teams were made aware of the importance of data logging, not only during a competition but also during research as useful utility in their own laboratory. Tasks and functionality benchmarks are explained in detail, starting with their use case in industry, further detailing their execution and providing information on scoring and ranking mechanisms for the specific benchmark.