Experiences with CiceRobot, a Museum Guide Cognitive Robot

2005

A key role for the knowledge sharing on the Web is the constructive interaction between system and user. It is presented an application implemented on Cicerobot, a RWI B21 autonomous robot. It is based on a cognitive architecture and works on tasks related with guided tours in the Archaeological Museum of Agrigento. Interaction between Cicerobot and the user is based on a first step towards semantics sharing between them. To this purpose knowledge is represented through sub-symbolically model inside the robot. Being Cicerobot a node on the Web, its knowledge can be shared and virtual interaction during the visit is permitted. Experimental results are also presented showing the effectiveness of the retrieval system.

Cognitive Computation, 2019

One of the aims of cognitive robotics is to endow robots with the ability to plan solutions for complex goals and then to enact those plans. Additionally, robots should react properly upon encountering unexpected changes in their environment that are not part of their planned course of actions. This requires a close coupling between deliberative and reactive control flows. From the perspective of robotics, this coupling generally entails a tightly integrated perceptuomotor system, which is then loosely connected to some specific form of deliberative system such as a planner. From the high-level perspective of automated planning, the emphasis is on a highly functional system that, taken to its extreme, calls perceptual and motor modules as services when required. This paper proposes to join the perceptual and acting perspectives via a unique representation where the responses of all software modules in the architecture are generalized using the same set of tokens. The proposed representation integrates symbolic and metric information. The proposed approach has been successfully tested in CLARC, a robot that performs Comprehensive Geriatric Assessments of elderly patients. The robot was favourably appraised in a survey conducted to assess its behaviour. For instance,

Semantic Information in …

Abstract— This paper presents a distributed hybrid architec-ture for knowledge representation and data fusion for Robotics and Ambient Intelligence applications. The work is motivated by the need to adopt a common framework to deal with different aspects of a “smart space”. ...

2007

We present integration mechanisms for combining heterogeneous components in a situated information processing system, illustrated by a cognitive robot able to collaborate with a human and display some understanding of its surroundings. These mechanisms include an architectural schema that encourages parallel and incremental information processing, and a method for binding information from distinct representations that when faced with rapid change in the world can maintain a coherent, though distributed, view of it. Provisional results are demonstrated in a robot combining vision, manipulation, language, planning and reasoning capabilities interacting with a human and manipulable objects.

SPIE Proceedings, 2013

We describe a cognitive vision system for a mobile robot. This system works in a manner similar to the human vision system, using saccadic, vergence and pursuit movements to extract information from visual input. At each fixation, the system builds a 3D model of a small region, combining information about distance, shape, texture and motion. These 3D models are embedded within an overall 3D model of the robot's environment. This approach turns the computer vision problem into a search problem, with the goal of constructing a physically realistic model of the entire environment. At each step, the vision system selects a point in the visual input to focus on. The distance, shape, texture and motion information are computed in a small region and used to build a mesh in a 3D virtual world. Background knowledge is used to extend this structure as appropriate, e.g. if a patch of wall is seen, it is hypothesized to be part of a large wall and the entire wall is created in the virtual world, or if part of an object is recognized, the whole object's mesh is retrieved from the library of objects and placed into the virtual world. The difference between the input from the real camera and from the virtual camera is compared using local Gaussians, creating an error mask that indicates the main differences between them. This is then used to select the next points to focus on. This approach permits us to use very expensive algorithms on small localities, thus generating very accurate models. It also is task-oriented, permitting the robot to use its knowledge about its task and goals to decide which parts of the environment need to be examined. The software components of this architecture include PhysX for the 3D virtual world, OpenCV and the Point Cloud Library for visual processing, and the Soar cognitive architecture, which controls the perceptual processing and robot planning. The hardware is a custom-built pan-tilt stereo color camera. We describe experiments using both static and moving objects.

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.

Advances in Artificial …, 2010

Abstract. In this paper, we present the development of a tour–guide robot that conducts a poster session through spoken Spanish. The robot is able to navigate around its environment, visually identify informa-tional posters, and explain sections of the posters that users request via ...

Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2009

SYSTEMS SCIENCE, 2001

In this paper we will present Eldi, a mobile robot that has been in daily operation at the Elder Museum of Science and Technology at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria since December 1999. This is an ongoing project that was organized in three different stages, describing here the one that has been accomplished. The initial phase, termed "The Player", the second stage, actually under development, has been called "The Cicerone" and in a final phase, termed "The Vagabond", Eldi will be allowed to move erratically across the Museum. This paper will focus on the accomplished first stage to succinctly describe the physical robot and the environment and demos developed. Finally we will summarize some important lessons learnt.