Autonomous Assembly

We are now on the brink of a new era in construction – that of autonomous assembly. For some time, the widespread adoption of robotic and digital fabrication technologies has made it possible for architects and academic researchers to design non-standard, highly customised structures. These technologies have largely been limited by scalability, focusing mainly on top-down, bespoke fabrication projects, such as experimental pavilions and structures. Autonomous assembly and bottom-up construction techniques hold the promise of greater scalability, adaptability and potentially evolved design possibilities. By capitalising on the advances made in swarm robotics, the collective construction of the animal/insect kingdom, and advances in physical computational, programmable materials or self-assembly, architects and designers are now able to build from the bottom up. This issue presents future scenarios of autonomous assembly by highlighting the viability of decentralised, collective assembly systems, demonstrating the potential to deliver reconfigurable and adaptive solutions. Contributors include: Marcelo Coelho, Andong Liu, Robin Meier, Kieran Murphy and Heinrich Jaeger, Radhika Nagpal and Kirstin Petersen, and Zorana Zeravcic. Featured architects: Aranda\Lasch, Arup, Philippe Block, Gramazio Kohler Architects, Ibañez Kim, Achim Menges, Caitlin Mueller, Jose Sanchez, Athina Papadopoulou and Jared Laucks, and Skylar Tibbits.

Designing Autonomous Agents provides a summary and overview of the radically different architectures that have been developed over the past few years for organizing robots. These architectures have led to major breakthroughs that promise to revolutionize the study of autonomous agents and perhaps artificial intelligence in general. The new architectures emphasize more direct coupling of sensing to action, distributedness and decentralization, dynamic interaction with the environment, and intrinsic mechanisms to cope with limited resources and incomplete knowledge. The research discussed here encompasses such important ideas as emergent functionality, task-level decomposition, and reasoning methods such as analogical representations and visual operations that make the task of perception more realistic. Contents A Biological Perspective on Autonomous Agent Design, Randall D. Beer, Hillel J. Chiel, Leon S. Sterling * Elephants Don't Play Chess, Rodney A. Brooks * What Are Plans For? Philip E. Agre and David Chapman * Action and Planning in Embedded Agents, Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Stanley J. Rosenschein * Situated Agents Can Have Goals, Pattie Maes * Exploiting Analogical Representations, Luc Steels * Internalized Plans: A Representation for Action Resources, David W. Payton * Integrating Behavioral, Perceptual, and World Knowledge in Reactive Navigation, Ronald C. Arkin * Symbol Grounding via a Hybrid Architecture in an Autonomous Assembly System, Chris Malcolm and Tim Smithers * Animal Behavior as a Paradigm for Developing Robot Autonomy, Tracy L. Anderson and Max Donath

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Towards Autonomous Robotics, TAROS 2017, held in Guildford, UK, in July 2017. The 43 revised full papers presented together with 13 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 66 submissions. The papers discuss robotics research drawn from a wide and diverse range of topics, such as swarm and multi-robotic systems; human-robot interaction; robotic learning and imitation; robot navigation, planning and safety; humanoid and bio-inspired robots; mobile robots and vehicles; robot testing and design; detection and recognition; learning and adaptive behaviours; interaction; soft and reconfigurable robots; and service and industrial robots.

One of the great challenges in flexible production and supply chains is the availability of necessary information at any time and place. Autonomous logistics processes can bring about fast and flexible adaptations to change. This book identifies autonomous logistics processes and details how they differ from conventionally managed processes. Coverage also describes the changes that autonomy will cause in order processing.

As a new strategy to realize the goal of flexible, robust, fault-tolerant robotic systems, the distributed autonomous approach has quickly established itself as one of the fastest growing fields in robotics. This book is one of the first to devote itself solely to this exciting area of research, covering such topics as self-organization, communication and coordination, multi-robot manipulation and control, distributed system design, distributed sensing, intelligent manufacturing systems, and group behavior. The fundamental technologies and system architectures of distributed autonomous robotic systems are expounded in detail, along with the latest research findings. This book should prove indispensable not only to those involved with robotic engineering but also to those in the fields of artificial intelligence, self-organizing systems, and coordinated control.

The two volumes LNAI 11649 and 11650 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference "Towards Autonomous Robotics", TAROS 2019, held in London, UK, in July 2019. The 87 full papers and 12 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. The papers present and discuss significant findings and advances in autonomous robotics research and applications. They are organized in the following topical sections: robotic grippers and manipulation; soft robotics, sensing and mobile robots; robotic learning, mapping and planning; human-robot interaction; and robotic systems and applications.

A collection of papers dealing with complete systems of intelligent robots, focusing on autonomy. The contributions cover intelligent perception, intelligent planning and control, and integrated systems.