Architectural Description (AD) is the backbone that facilitates the implementation and validation of robotic systems. In general, current high-level ADs reflect great variation and lead to various difficulties, including mixing ADs with implementation issues. They lack the qualities of being systematic and coherent, as well as lacking technical-related forms (e.g., icons of faces, computer screens). Additionally, a variety of languages exist for eliciting requirements, such as object-oriented analysis methods susceptible to inconsistency (e.g., those using multiple diagrams in UML and SysML). In this paper, we orient our research toward a more generic conceptualization of ADs in robotics. We apply a new modeling methodology, namely the Thinging Machine (TM), to describe the architecture in robotic systems. The focus of such an application is on high-level specification, which is one important aspect for realizing the design and implementation in such systems. TM modeling can be utilized in documentation and communication and as the first step in the system s design phase. Accordingly, sample robot architectures are re-expressed in terms of TM, thus developing (1) a static model that captures the robot s atemporal aspects, (2) a dynamic model that identifies states, and (3) a behavioral model that specifies the chronology of events in the system. This result shows a viable approach in robot modeling that determines a robot system s behavior through its static description.
Prince Sultan University（苏丹王子大学）；CISTER Research Unit（CISTER研究单元）；Gaitech Robotics（Gaitech机器人公司）
In this article, we present an overview of the use of service-oriented architecture and Web services in developing robotics applications and software integrated with the Internet and the Cloud. This is a recent trend that emerged since 2010 from the concept of cloud robotics, which leverages the use of cloud infrastructures for robotics applications following a service-oriented architecture approach. In particular, we distinguish two main categories: (\textit{i.}) virtualization of robotics systems and (\textit{ii.}) computation offloading from robots to cloud-based services. We discuss the ma…
Known attempts to build autonomous robots rely on complex control architectures, often implemented with the Robot Operating System platform (ROS). Runtime adaptation is needed in these systems, to cope with component failures and with contingencies arising from dynamic environments-otherwise, these affect the reliability and quality of the mission execution. Existing proposals on how to build self-adaptive systems in robotics usually require a major re-design of the control architecture and rely on complex tools unfamiliar to the robotics community. Moreover, they are hard to reuse across appl…
University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard (UTBM)（贝尔福-蒙贝利亚尔技术大学（UTBM））；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）
This paper presents the research focus and ideas incorporated in the EPANer robotics team, entering the World Robot Challenge 2020 - Partner Robot Challenge (Real Space).
While social robots are developed to provide assistance to users through social interactions, their behaviors are dominantly pre-programmed and remote-controlled. Despite the numerous robot control architectures being developed, very few offer reutilization opportunities in various therapeutic contexts. To bridge this gap, we propose a robot control architecture to be applied in different scenarios taking into account requirements from both therapeutic and robotic perspectives. As robot behaviors are kept at an abstract level and afterward mapped with the robot's morphology, the proposed archi…
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz（德国人工智能研究中心）
In this paper we present a workflow to design and control robot manipulation behavior. To remain independent from particular robot hardware and an explicit area of application, an embedded domain specific language (eDSL) is used to describe the particular robot and a controller network that drives the robot. We make use of a) a component-based software framework, b) model-based algorithms for motion- and sensor processing representations, c) an abstract model of the control system, and d) a plan management software, to describe a sequence of software component networks that generate the desire…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Université de Picardie Jules Verne（皮卡第儒勒-凡尔纳大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université Montpellier 2（蒙彼利埃第二大学）
Cloud robotics is a field of robotics that attempts to invoke Cloud technologies such as Cloud computing, Cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centered around the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics. In a few short years, Cloud robotics as a newly emerged field has already received much research and industrial attention. The use of the Cloud for robotics and automation brings some potential benefits largely ameliorating the performance of robotic systems. However, there are also some challenges. First of all, from the viewpoint of architecture, how t…
University of Cape Town（开普敦大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati（印度理工学院古瓦哈提分校）；GE Global Research（通用电气全球研发中心）
In this paper, we introduce a cerebral cortex inspired architecture for robots in which we have mapped hierarchical cortical representation of human brain to logic flow and decision making process. Our work focuses on the two major features of human cognitive process, viz. the perception action cycle and its hierarchical organization, and the decision making process. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed method, we incorporated this architecture in our robot which we named as Cognitive Insect Robot inspired by Brain Architecture (CIRBA). We have extended our research to the implementation…
Institute of Computer Science, University of Natural Sciences and Humanities（自然与人文科学大学计算机科学研究所）；Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院计算机科学研究所）
A generic architecture for a class of distributed robotic systems is presented. The architecture supports openness and heterogeneity, i.e. heterogeneous components may be joined and removed from the systems without affecting its basic functionality. The architecture is based on the paradigm of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and a generic representation (ontology) of the environment. A device (e.g. robot) is seen as a collection of its capabilities exposed as services. Generic protocols for publishing, discovering, arranging services are proposed for creating composite services that can a…
Extended URDF: Accounting for parallel mechanism in robot description
LAAS-CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心自动化与系统分析实验室）；Inria Bordeaux（波尔多信息与自动化研究所）；Inria - Département d’Informatique de l'Ecole normale supérieure, PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学巴黎高等师范学院信息学系）；ANITI（图卢兹人工智能与数字技术研究所）
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；NASA Johnson Space Center（美国国家航空航天局约翰逊航天中心）
Multi-robot systems are an efficient method to explore and map an unknown environment. The simulataneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm is common for single robot systems, however multiple robots can share respective map data in order to merge a larger global map. This thesis contributes to the multi-robot mapping problem by considering cases in which robots have communication range limitations. The architecture coordinates a team of robots and the central server to explore an unknown environment by exploiting a hierarchical choice structure. The coordination algorithms ensure that …
Information Technologies Institute, CERTH - Centre for Research and Technology Hellas（希腊研究与技术中心信息技术研究所）；Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
Nowadays, the construction of a complex robotic system requires a high level of specialization in a large number of diverse scientific areas. It is reasonable that a single researcher cannot create from scratch the entirety of this system, as it is impossible for him to have the necessary skills in the necessary fields. This obstacle is being surpassed with the existent robotic frameworks. This paper tries to give an extensive review of the most famous robotic frameworks and middleware, as well as to provide the means to effortlessly compare them. Additionally, we try to investigate the differ…
A method for Selecting Scenes and Emotion-based Descriptions for a Robot's Diary
Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, The University of Tokyo（东京大学跨学科信息学研究生院）；Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（东京大学信息科学与技术研究生院）
Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England（西英格兰大学布里斯托机器人实验室）
Robots are becoming ever more autonomous. This expanding ability to take unsupervised decisions renders it imperative that mechanisms are in place to guarantee the safety of behaviours executed by the robot. Moreover, smart autonomous robots should be more than safe; they should also be explicitly ethical -- able to both choose and justify actions that prevent harm. Indeed, as the cognitive, perceptual and motor capabilities of robots expand, they will be expected to have an improved capacity for making moral judgements. We present a control architecture that supplements existing robot control…
LITIS, University of Le Havre（勒阿弗尔大学LITIS）；GREAH, University of Le Havre（勒阿弗尔大学GREAH）；IUT GEII, University of Le Havre（勒阿弗尔大学IUT GEII）
This paper presents a novel decentralized interactive architecture for aerial and ground mobile robots cooperation. The aerial mobile robot is used to provide a global coverage during an area inspection, while the ground mobile robot is used to provide a local coverage of ground features. We include a human-in-the-loop to provide waypoints for the ground mobile robot to progress safely in the inspected area. The aerial mobile robot follows continuously the ground mobile robot in order to always keep it in its coverage view.
We have developed service robot management system to facilitate effective collaboration between multiple units and types of robots in operation. This system is implemented by serverless architecture on cloud and using cellular based IoT communication. So it has not only usual cloud system advantage that it is not necessary to prepare dedicated server and network equipment, but it reduces management efforts of servers. We have tested the system with robots in a public facility, and successfully confirmed its performance and functionality.
CITEC；Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）；Honda Research Institute Europe（本田欧洲研究院）
In recent years, an increased effort has been invested to improve the capabilities of robots. Nevertheless, human-robot interaction remains a complex field of application where errors occur frequently. The reasons for these errors can primarily be divided into two classes. Foremost, the recent increase in capabilities also widened possible sources of errors on the robot's side. This entails problems in the perception of the world, but also faulty behavior, based on errors in the system. Apart from that, non-expert users frequently have incorrect assumptions about the functionality and limitati…
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
In an effort to penetrate the market at an affordable cost, consumer robots tend to provide limited processing capabilities, just enough to serve the purpose they have been designed for. However, a robot, in principle, should be able to interact and process the constantly increasing information streams generated from sensors or other devices. This would require the implementation of algorithms and mathematical models for the accurate processing of data volumes and significant computational resources. It is clear that as the data deluge continues to grow exponentially, deploying such algorithms…
Plymouth University（普利茅斯大学）；Naval Research Laboratory（美国海军研究实验室）
This volume is the proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Cognitive Architectures for Social Human-Robot Interaction, held at the ACM/IEEE HRI 2016 conference, which took place on Monday 7th March 2016, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Organised by Paul Baxter (Plymouth University, U.K.), J. Gregory Trafton (Naval Research Laboratory, USA), and Severin Lemaignan (Plymouth University, U.K.).
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology（蔚山国立科学技术院）
With the advance in robotic hardware and intelligent software, humanoid robot plays an important role in various tasks including service for human assistance and heavy job for hazardous industry. Recent advances in task learning enable humanoid robots to conduct dexterous manipulation tasks such as grasping objects and assembling parts of furniture. Operating objects without physical movements is an even more challenging task for humanoid robot because effects of actions may not be clearly seen in the physical configuration space and meaningful actions could be very complex in a long time hori…
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）
In collaborative robotic cells, a human operator and a robot share the workspace in order to execute a common job, consisting of a set of tasks. A proper allocation and scheduling of the tasks for the human and for the robot is crucial for achieving an efficient human-robot collaboration. In order to deal with the dynamic and unpredictable behavior of the human and for allowing the human and the robot to negotiate about the tasks to be executed, a two layers architecture for solving the task allocation and scheduling problem is proposed. The first layer optimally solves the task allocation pro…
Natural language-based robotic navigation remains a challenging problem due to the human knowledge of navigation constraints, and destination is not directly compatible with the robot knowledge base. In this paper, we aim to translate natural destination commands into high-level robot navigation plans given a map of interest. We identify grammatically associated segments of destination description and recursively apply each of them to update a belief distribution of an area over the given map.We train a destination grounding model using a dataset of single-step belief update for precise, proxi…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Università degli Studi di Genova（热那亚大学）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）
A common approach to the generation of walking patterns for humanoid robots consists in adopting a layered control architecture. This paper proposes an architecture composed of three nested control loops. The outer loop exploits a robot kinematic model to plan the footstep positions. In the mid layer, a predictive controller generates a Center of Mass trajectory according to the well-known table-cart model. Through a whole-body inverse kinematics algorithm, we can define joint references for position controlled walking. The outcomes of these two loops are then interpreted as inputs of a stack-…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
When developing general purpose robots, the overarching software architecture can greatly affect the ease of accomplishing various tasks. Initial efforts to create unified robot systems in the 1990s led to hybrid architectures, emphasizing a hierarchy in which deliberative plans direct the use of reactive skills. However, since that time there has been significant progress in the low-level skills available to robots, including manipulation and perception, making it newly feasible to accomplish many more tasks in real-world domains. There is thus renewed optimism that robots will be able to per…
This paper proposes an architecture for achieving telexistence and teleoperation of humanoid robots. The architecture combines several technological set-ups, methodologies, locomotion and manipulation algorithms in a novel manner, thus building upon and extending works available in literature. The approach allows a human operator to command and telexist with the robot. Therefore, in this work we treat aspects pertaining not only to the proposed architecture structure and implementation, but also the human operator experience in terms of ability to adapt to the robot and to the architecture. Al…
Edge computing is becoming more and more popular among researchers who seek to take advantage of the edge resources and the minimal time delays, in order to run their robotic applications more efficiently. Recently, many edge architectures have been proposed, each of them having their advantages and disadvantages, depending on each application. In this work, we present two different edge architectures for controlling the trajectory of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The first architecture is based on docker containers and the second one is based on kubernetes, while the main framework for op…
Great advancements have been achieved in the field of robotics, however, main challenges remain, including building robots with an adaptive Theory of Mind (ToM). In the present paper, seven current robotic architectures for human-robot interactions were described as well as four main functional advantages of equipping robots with an adaptive ToM. The aim of the present paper was to determine in which way and how often ToM features are integrated in the architectures analyzed, and if they provide robots with the associated functional advantages. Our assessment shows that different methods are u…
Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）
This paper contributes towards the development and comparison of Divergent-Component-of-Motion (DCM) based control architectures for humanoid robot locomotion. More precisely, we present and compare several DCM based implementations of a three layer control architecture. From top to bottom, these three layers are here called: trajectory optimization, simplified model control, and whole-body QP control. All layers use the DCM concept to generate references for the layer below. For the simplified model control layer, we present and compare both instantaneous and Receding Horizon Control controll…
This paper describes the dialog robot system designed by Team Irisapu for the preliminary round of the Dialogue Robot Competition 2022 (DRC2022). Our objective was to design a hospitable travel agent robot. The system we developed was ranked 8th out of 13 systems in the preliminary round of the competition, but our robot received high marks for its naturalness and likeability.Our next challenge is to create a system that can provide more useful information to users.
Robots have inherently limited onboard processing, storage, and power capabilities. Cloud computing resources have the potential to provide significant advantages for robots in many applications. However, to make use of these resources, frameworks must be developed that facilitate robot interactions with cloud services. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based architecture called Smart Cloud that intends to overcome the physical limitations of single- or multi-robot systems through massively parallel computation, provided on demand by cloud services. Smart Cloud is implemented on Amazon Web Ser…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
The paper presents a software architecture to optimize the process of prototyping and deploying robot controllers that are synthesized using model-based design methodologies. The architecture is composed of a framework and a pipeline. Therefore, the contribution of the paper is twofold. First, we introduce an open-source actor-oriented framework that abstracts the common robotic uses of middlewares, optimizers, and simulators. Using this framework, we then present a pipeline that implements the model-based design methodology. The components of the proposed framework are generic, and they can b…
University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；ISTC-CNR（意大利国家研究委员会认知科学与技术研究所）；Innopolis University（因诺波利斯大学）
Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with their users. Moreover, in this context recurrent software design issues such as ensuring interoperability, improving reusability and customizability of software components also arise. Designing and implementing social robotic software architectures is a time-intensive activity requiring multi-disciplinary expertise: this makes difficult to rapidly develop, c…
CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LAAS（系统分析与架构实验室）；Univ de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；INP（国立理工学院）；INSA（国立应用科学学院）
The topic of joint actions has been deeply studied in the context of Human-Human interaction in order to understand how humans cooperate. Creating autonomous robots that collaborate with humans is a complex problem, where it is relevant to apply what has been learned in the context of Human-Human interaction. The question is what skills to implement and how to integrate them in order to build a cognitive architecture, allowing a robot to collaborate efficiently and naturally with humans. In this paper, we first list a set of skills that we consider essential for Joint Action, then we analyze t…
Robotic systems are more connected, networked, and distributed than ever. New architectures that comply with the \textit{de facto} robotics middleware standard, ROS\,2, have recently emerged to fill the gap in terms of hybrid systems deployed from edge to cloud. This paper reviews new architectures and technologies that enable containerized robotic applications to seamlessly run at the edge or in the cloud. We also overview systems that include solutions from extension to ROS\,2 tooling to the integration of Kubernetes and ROS\,2. Another important trend is robot learning, and how new simulato…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（产业技术综合研究所）
This paper contributes towards the benchmarking of control architectures for bipedal robot locomotion. It considers architectures that are based on the Divergent Component of Motion (DCM) and composed of three main layers: trajectory optimization, simplified model control, and whole-body QP control layer. While the first two layers use simplified robot models, the whole-body QP control layer uses a complete robot model to produce either desired positions, velocities, or torques inputs at the joint-level. This paper then compares two implementations of the simplified model control layer, which …
In this paper we propose FlexHRC+, a hierarchical human-robot cooperation architecture designed to provide collaborative robots with an extended degree of autonomy when supporting human operators in high-variability shop-floor tasks. The architecture encompasses three levels, namely for perception, representation, and action. Building up on previous work, here we focus on (i) an in-the-loop decision making process for the operations of collaborative robots coping with the variability of actions carried out by human operators, and (ii) the representation level, integrating a hierarchical AND/OR…
This paper presents a novel robot vision architecture for perceiving generic 3D clothes configurations. Our architecture is hierarchically structured, starting from low-level curvatures, across mid-level geometric shapes \& topology descriptions; and finally approaching high-level semantic surface structure descriptions. We demonstrate our robot vision architecture in a customised dual-arm industrial robot with our self-designed, off-the-self stereo vision system, carrying out autonomous grasping and dual-arm flattening. It is worth noting that the proposed dual-arm flattening approach is uniq…
Traditional software development in robotics is about programming functionality in the CPU of a given robot with a pre-defined architecture and constraints. With adaptive computing, instead, building a robotic behavior is about programming an architecture. By leveraging adaptive computing, roboticists can adapt one or more of the properties of its computing systems (e.g. its determinism, power consumption, security posture, or throughput) at run time. Roboticists are not, however, hardware engineers, and embedded expertise is scarce among them. This white paper adopts a ROS 2 roboticist-centri…
HEXAR: a Hierarchical Explainability Architecture for Robots
Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (CSIC-UPC)（机器人与信息工业研究所（CSIC-UPC））；PAL Robotics（PAL机器人技术公司）；University of Naples Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学）；Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC)（人工智能研究所（IIIA-CSIC））
Long-term autonomy of robotic systems implicitly requires dependable platforms that are able to naturally handle hardware and software faults, problems in behaviors, or lack of knowledge. Model-based dependable platforms additionally require the application of rigorous methodologies during the system development, including the use of correct-by-construction techniques to implement robot behaviors. As the level of autonomy in robots increases, so do the cost of offering guarantees about the dependability of the system. Certifiable dependability of autonomous robots, we argue, can benefit from f…
