Robot Colonies

Robots in groups or colonies can exhibit an enormous variety and richness of behaviors which cannot be observed with singly autonomous systems. Of course, this is analogous to the amazing variety of group animal behaviors which can be observed in nature. In recent years more and more investigators have started to study these behaviors. The studies range from classifications and taxonomies of behaviors, to development of architectures which cause such group activities as flocking or swarming, and from emphasis on the role of intelligent agents in such groups to studies of learning and obstacle avoidance. There used to be a time when many robotics researchers would question those who were interested in working with teams of robots: `Why are you worried about robotic teams when it's hard enough to just get one to work?'. This issue responds to that question. Robot Colonies provides a new approach to task problem-solving that is similar in many ways to distributed computing. Multiagent robotic teams offer the possibility of spatially distributed parallel and concurrent perception and action. A paradigm shift results when using multiple robots, providing a different perspective on how to carry out complex tasks. New issues such as interagent communications, spatial task distribution, heterogeneous or homogeneous societies, and interference management are now central to achieving coordinated and productive activity within a colony. Fortunately mobile robot hardware has evolved sufficiently in terms of both cost and robustness to enable these issues to be studied on actual robots and not merely in simulation. Robot Colonies presents a sampling of the research in this field. While capturing a reasonable representation of the most important work within this area, its objective is not to be a comprehensive survey, but rather to stimulate new research by exposing readers to the principles of robot group behaviors, architectures and theories. Robot Colonies is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising eight invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Autonomous Robots (Volume 4, Number 1).

An introduction to the science and practice of autonomous robots that reviews over 300 current systems and examines the underlying technology.

Designed for beginners, undergraduate students, and robotics enthusiasts, Practical Robot Design: Game Playing Robots is a comprehensive guide to the theory, design, and construction of game-playing robots. Drawing on years of robot building and teaching experience, the authors demonstrate the key steps of building a robot from beginning to end, wi

A roboticist imagines life with robots that sell us products, drive our cars, even allow us to assume new physical form, and more. With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings. Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of “gaze tracking”; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh examines the underlying technology and the social consequences of each scenario. He also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.

Robots That Talk and Listen provides a forward-looking examination of speech and language in robots from technical, functional, and social perspectives. Contributors address cultural foundations as well as the linguistic skills and technologies that robots need to function effectively in real-world settings. Among the most difficult and complex is the ability to understand and use language. Speech-enabled automata are already serving as interactive toys, teacher’s aides, and research assistants. These robots will soon be joined by personal companions, industrial co-workers, and military support automata. The social impact of these and other robots extends well beyond the specific tasks they perform. Contributors tackle the most knotty of those issues, notably acceptance of advanced, speech-enabled robots and developing ethical and moral controls for robots. Topics in this book include: • Language and Beyond: The True Meaning of “Speech Enabled” • Robots in Myth and Media • Enabling Robots to Converse • Language Learning by Automata • Handling Noisy Settings • Empirical Studies of Robots in Real-World Environments • Acceptance of Intelligent Robots • Managing Robots that Can Lie and Deceive • Envisioning a World Shared with Intelligent Robots

foreword by Lashon Booker To program an autonomous robot to act reliably in a dynamic environment is a complex task. The dynamics of the environment are unpredictable, and the robots' sensors provide noisy input. A learning autonomous robot, one that can acquire knowledge through interaction with its environment and then adapt its behavior, greatly simplifies the designer's work. A learning robot need not be given all of the details of its environment, and its sensors and actuators need not be finely tuned. Robot Shaping is about designing and building learning autonomous robots. The term "shaping" comes from experimental psychology, where it describes the incremental training of animals. The authors propose a new engineering discipline, "behavior engineering," to provide the methodologies and tools for creating autonomous robots. Their techniques are based on classifier systems, a reinforcement learning architecture originated by John Holland, to which they have added several new ideas, such as "mutespec," classifier system "energy,"and dynamic population size. In the book they present Behavior Analysis and Training (BAT) as an example of a behavior engineering methodology.

This book provides an overview of recent research developments in the automation and control of robotic systems that collaborate with humans. A measure of human collaboration being necessary for the optimal operation of any robotic system, the contributors exploit a broad selection of such systems to demonstrate the importance of the subject, particularly where the environment is prone to uncertainty or complexity. They show how such human strengths as high-level decision-making, flexibility, and dexterity can be combined with robotic precision, and ability to perform task repetitively or in a dangerous environment. The book focuses on quantitative methods and control design for guaranteed robot performance and balanced human experience from both physical human-robot interaction and social human-robot interaction. Its contributions develop and expand upon material presented at various international conferences. They are organized into three parts covering: one-human–one-robot collaboration; one-human–multiple-robot collaboration; and human–swarm collaboration. Individual topic areas include resource optimization (human and robotic), safety in collaboration, human trust in robot and decision-making when collaborating with robots, abstraction of swarm systems to make them suitable for human control, modeling and control of internal force interactions for collaborative manipulation, and the sharing of control between human and automated systems, etc. Control and decision-making algorithms feature prominently in the text, importantly within the context of human factors and the constraints they impose. Applications such as assistive technology, driverless vehicles, cooperative mobile robots, manufacturing robots and swarm robots are considered. Illustrative figures and tables are provided throughout the book. Researchers and students working in controls, and the interaction of humans and robots will learn new methods for human–robot collaboration from this book and will find the cutting edge of the subject described in depth.