ViRbot: A System for the Operation of Mobile Robots

Complex robotic tasks require the coordination of a considerable amount of skills. This is generally achieved generating and executing action plans that fulfill the preconditions of the given objective. These tasks can be highly dynamic, since the appearance of new objects or unexpected situations is a constant during the plan execution. In this context, robot control systems require the capability of managing a suitable world model (creating, removing or retyping dynamically objects as a result of the plan execution), and the capability of monitoring and replanning when unexpected situations are detected. In this paper we introduce a general-purpose architecture for autonomous mobile robots providing these features. The architecture allows to generate planning applications since it integrates planning, re-planning, monitoring and learning capabilities, and, at the same time, manages a consistent graph-like world model. Finally, we present some preliminary results of the deployment of such architecture in an advertisement promoting robot domain.

Journal of Logic and Computation, 1999

We describe an approach to reasoning agents which is based on a formal theory of actions and is actually implemented on a mobile robot working in an office environment. From an epistemological viewpoint, our proposal is originated by the correspondence between Dynamic Logics and Description Logics. Specifically, we consider an epistemic extension of Description Logics to provide a new theoretical framework for the representation of dynamic systems, where the agent's reasoning is based on its knowledge about the world. In this setting, we obtain a weaker notion of logical inference, thus simplifying the reasoning task. From a practical viewpoint, we use a general purpose knowledge representation system based on Description Logics and its associated reasoning tools, in order to plan the actions of the mobile robot 'Tino', starting from the knowledge about the environment and the action specification. In addition, we exploit the robot's capabilities in order to integrate the execution of the plan with reactive behaviours, thus enabling the agent to accomplish its tasks in the real world.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2019

This paper presents the semantic-reasoning module of VIRBOT, our proposed architecture for service robots. We show that by combining symbolic AI with digital-signal processing techniques this module achieves competitive performance. Our system translates a voice command into an unambiguous representation that helps an inference engine, built around an expert system, to perform action and motion planning. First, in the natural-language interpretation process, the system generates two outputs: (1) conceptual dependence, expressing the linguistic meaning of the statement, and (2) verbal confirmation, a paraphrase in natural language that is repeated to the user to confirm that the command has been correctly understood. Then, a conceptual-dependency interpreter extracts semantic role structures from the input sentence and looks for such structures in a set of known interpretation patterns. We evaluate this approach in a series of skill-specific semantic-reasoning experiments. Finally, we demonstrate our system in the general-purpose service robot test of the RoboCup-at-Home international competition, where incomplete information is given to a robot and the robot must recognize and request the missing information, and we compare our results with a series of baselines from the competition where our proposal performed best.

2002

Abstract This paper presents a patterns-oriented framework designed for the development of automatic and deliberative skills. It is based on the concept of distributed active objects, which are autonomous execution entities with their own threads of control, and can interact with others using event notification. In this architecture, each skill is viewed as an integration of a set of reusable software components.

1989

T h i s paper presents a general-purpose architecture for oonyolling mobde robots, and describes a working mobile manipulator which uses the architecture to operate in a dynamic and uncertain environment. The target of this work is to develop a distributed robot architecture for planning, execution, monitoring, exception handling, and multiple task coordination. We report our progress to date on the architecture development and the performance of the working robot. In particular, we discuss temporal reasoning, execution monitoring. and context-dependent exception handling.

SPIIRAS Proceedings

Service robots are intended to help humans in non-industrial environments such as houses or offices. To accomplish their goal, service robots must have several skills such as object recognition and manipulation, face detection and recognition, speech recognition and synthesis, task planning and, one of the most important, navigation in dynamic environments. This paper describes a fully implemented motion-planning system which comprehends from motion and path planning algorithms to spatial representation and behavior-based active navigation. The proposed system is implemented in Justina, a domestic service robot whose design is based on the ViRBot, an architecture to operate virtual and real robots that encompasses several layers of abstraction, from low-level control to symbolic planning. We evaluated our proposal both in simulated and real environments and compared it to classical implementations. For the tests, we used maps obtained from real environments (the Biorobotics Laboratory and the Robocup@Home arena) and maps generated from obstacles with random positions and shapes. Several parameters were used for comparison: the total traveled distance, the number of collisions, the number of reached goal points and the average execution speed. Our proposal performed significantly better both in real and simulated tests. Finally, we show our results in the context of the RoboCup@Home competition, where the system was successfully tested.

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2013

In this paper we present SitLog: a declarative situation-oriented logical language for programming situated service robot tasks. The formalism is task and domain independent, and can be used in a wide variety of settings. SitLog can also be seen as a behaviour engineering specification and interpretation formalism to support action selection by autonomous agents during the execution of complex tasks. The language combines the recursive transition network formalism, extended with functions to express dynamic and contextualized task structures, with a functional language to express control and content information. The SitLog interpreter is written in Prolog and SitLog’s programs follow closely the Prolog notation, permitting the declarative specification and direct interpretation of complex applications in a modular and compact form.We discuss the structure and representation of service robot tasks in practical settings and how these can be expressed in SitLog. The present framework has been tested in the service robot Golem-II+ using the specification and programming of the typical tasks which require completion in the RoboCup@Home Competition.

As far as I can remember I have always been fascinated about space. When I saw a documentary about the Russian moon many years ago, I realized that robots are great tools for space exploration. They can be operated from the earth without any risk to humans, or travel through space autonomously. It was then that I became interested in robotics and my curiosity about the subject would grow with the years. The android Data from the television sci-fi Star Trek, an article about the robot Genghis that learnt itself to walk, a documentary about Luc Steels' robot experiments, and especially the deployment of the rover Sojourner on Mars, they all contributed to my interest in robotics. An obligatory part of the computer science Master's program of the Delft University of Technology (DUT) is the research project, usually done in the fourth or fifth year. The main goal of this project is to gain experience in research. Since there is no course on intelligent robotics at the DUT, this was the perfect opportunity for me to learn more about robotics and Artificial intelligence. To get acquainted with the subject, I decided to start by reading some books and articles that gave a general overview of the field. The results can be found in the first part of this report. The first books and articles I read mentioned Rodney Brooks and his subsumption robot architecture quite often. When I did further research on this topic I discovered the interesting subfield of behavior-based robotics, described in the second part in this report. The third part deals with a fairly new subject called evolutionary robotics that allowed me to combine robotics with another interest of mine, which is genetic algorithms. During my search for information on robots I found that many papers on robots can be found on the World Wide Web. The sites and pages I used in my research are included in the appendix at the end of the report. I would like to thank everyone who helped me with my research, especially Leon Rothkrantz for his supervision and guidance during this project.

2000

The goal of this research is to develop an intuitive, adaptive, and flexible architecture for intelligent mobile robots. We propose a hybrid architecture that uses behaviour trees and finite state machines. A task manager selects behaviours based on approximations of their applicability and the expected reward of a behaviour. One major feature of this architecture is that important information of