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Chapter 76 — Evolutionary Robotics

Stefano Nolfi, Josh Bongard, Phil Husbands and Dario Floreano

Evolutionary Robotics is a method for automatically generating artificial brains and morphologies of autonomous robots. This approach is useful both for investigating the design space of robotic applications and for testing scientific hypotheses of biological mechanisms and processes. In this chapter we provide an overview of methods and results of Evolutionary Robotics with robots of different shapes, dimensions, and operation features. We consider both simulated and physical robots with special consideration to the transfer between the two worlds.

Discrimination of objects through sensory-motor coordination

Author  Stefano Nolfi

Video ID : 116

A Khepera robot provided with infrared sensors is evolved for the ability to find and remain close to a cylindrical object randomly located in the environment. The discrimination of the two types of objects (walls and cylinders) is realized by exploiting the limit-cycle oscillatory behavio,r which is produced by the robot near the cylinder and which emerges from the robot/environmental interactions (i.e., by the interplay between the way in which the robot react to sensory stimuli and the perceptual consequences of the robot actions).

Chapter 62 — Intelligent Vehicles

Alberto Broggi, Alex Zelinsky, Ümit Özgüner and Christian Laugier

This chapter describes the emerging robotics application field of intelligent vehicles – motor vehicles that have autonomous functions and capabilities. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 62.1 provides a motivation for why the development of intelligent vehicles is important, a brief history of the field, and the potential benefits of the technology. Section 62.2 describes the technologies that enable intelligent vehicles to sense vehicle, environment, and driver state, work with digital maps and satellite navigation, and communicate with intelligent transportation infrastructure. Section 62.3 describes the challenges and solutions associated with road scene understanding – a key capability for all intelligent vehicles. Section 62.4 describes advanced driver assistance systems, which use the robotics and sensing technologies described earlier to create new safety and convenience systems for motor vehicles, such as collision avoidance, lane keeping, and parking assistance. Section 62.5 describes driver monitoring technologies that are being developed to mitigate driver fatigue, inattention, and impairment. Section 62.6 describes fully autonomous intelligent vehicles systems that have been developed and deployed. The chapter is concluded in Sect. 62.7 with a discussion of future prospects, while Sect. 62.8 provides references to further reading and additional resources.

Bayesian Embedded Perception in Inria/Toyota instrumented platform

Author  Christian Laugier, E-Motion Team

Video ID : 566

This video illustrates the concept of “Embedded Bayesian Perception”, which has been developed by Inria and implemented on the Inria/Toyota experimental Lexus vehicle. The objective is to improve the robustness of the on-board perception system of the vehicle, by appropriately fusing the data provided by several heterogeneous sensors. The system has been developed as a key component of an electronic co-pilot, designed for the purpose of detecting dangerous driving situations a few seconds ahead. The approach relies on the concept of the “Bayesian Occupancy Filter” developed by the Inria E-Motion Team. More technical details can be found in [62.25].

Chapter 69 — Physical Human-Robot Interaction

Sami Haddadin and Elizabeth Croft

Over the last two decades, the foundations for physical human–robot interaction (pHRI) have evolved from successful developments in mechatronics, control, and planning, leading toward safer lightweight robot designs and interaction control schemes that advance beyond the current capacities of existing high-payload and highprecision position-controlled industrial robots. Based on their ability to sense physical interaction, render compliant behavior along the robot structure, plan motions that respect human preferences, and generate interaction plans for collaboration and coaction with humans, these novel robots have opened up novel and unforeseen application domains, and have advanced the field of human safety in robotics.

This chapter gives an overview on the state of the art in pHRI as of the date of publication. First, the advances in human safety are outlined, addressing topics in human injury analysis in robotics and safety standards for pHRI. Then, the foundations of human-friendly robot design, including the development of lightweight and intrinsically flexible force/torque-controlled machines together with the required perception abilities for interaction are introduced. Subsequently, motionplanning techniques for human environments, including the domains of biomechanically safe, risk-metric-based, human-aware planning are covered. Finally, the rather recent problem of interaction planning is summarized, including the issues of collaborative action planning, the definition of the interaction planning problem, and an introduction to robot reflexes and reactive control architecture for pHRI.

Injury evaluation of human-robot impacts

Author  Sami Haddadin, Alin Albu-Schäffer, Michael Strohmayr, Mirko Frommberger, Gerd Hirzinger

Video ID : 608

In this video, several blunt impact tests are shown, leading to an assessment of which factors dominate injury severity. We will illustrate the effects that robot speed, robot mass, and constraints in the environment have on safety in human-robot impacts. It will be shown that the intuition about high-impact loads being transmitted by heavy robots is wrong. Furthermore, the conclusion is reached that free impacts are by far less dangerous than being crushed. Reference: S. Haddadin, A. Albu-Schäffer, M. Strohmayr, M. Frommberger, G. Hirzinger: Injury evaluation of human-robot impacts, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. (ICRA), Pasadena (2008), pp. 2203 – 2204; doi: 10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543534.

Chapter 40 — Mobility and Manipulation

Oliver Brock, Jaeheung Park and Marc Toussaint

Mobile manipulation requires the integration of methodologies from all aspects of robotics. Instead of tackling each aspect in isolation,mobilemanipulation research exploits their interdependence to solve challenging problems. As a result, novel views of long-standing problems emerge. In this chapter, we present these emerging views in the areas of grasping, control, motion generation, learning, and perception. All of these areas must address the shared challenges of high-dimensionality, uncertainty, and task variability. The section on grasping and manipulation describes a trend towards actively leveraging contact and physical and dynamic interactions between hand, object, and environment. Research in control addresses the challenges of appropriately coupling mobility and manipulation. The field of motion generation increasingly blurs the boundaries between control and planning, leading to task-consistent motion in high-dimensional configuration spaces, even in dynamic and partially unknown environments. A key challenge of learning formobilemanipulation consists of identifying the appropriate priors, and we survey recent learning approaches to perception, grasping, motion, and manipulation. Finally, a discussion of promising methods in perception shows how concepts and methods from navigation and active perception are applied.

Free-floating autonomous underwater manipulation: Connector plug/unplug

Author  CIRS Universitat de Girona

Video ID : 789

Peg-in-hole demonstration performed autonomously with an underwater-vehicle manipulator system. The implementation is done through MoveIt!.

Chapter 63 — Medical Robotics and Computer-Integrated Surgery

Russell H. Taylor, Arianna Menciassi, Gabor Fichtinger, Paolo Fiorini and Paolo Dario

The growth of medical robotics since the mid- 1980s has been striking. From a few initial efforts in stereotactic brain surgery, orthopaedics, endoscopic surgery, microsurgery, and other areas, the field has expanded to include commercially marketed, clinically deployed systems, and a robust and exponentially expanding research community. This chapter will discuss some major themes and illustrate them with examples from current and past research. Further reading providing a more comprehensive review of this rapidly expanding field is suggested in Sect. 63.4.

Medical robotsmay be classified in many ways: by manipulator design (e.g., kinematics, actuation); by level of autonomy (e.g., preprogrammed versus teleoperation versus constrained cooperative control), by targeted anatomy or technique (e.g., cardiac, intravascular, percutaneous, laparoscopic, microsurgical); or intended operating environment (e.g., in-scanner, conventional operating room). In this chapter, we have chosen to focus on the role of medical robots within the context of larger computer-integrated systems including presurgical planning, intraoperative execution, and postoperative assessment and follow-up.

First, we introduce basic concepts of computerintegrated surgery, discuss critical factors affecting the eventual deployment and acceptance of medical robots, and introduce the basic system paradigms of surgical computer-assisted planning, execution, monitoring, and assessment (surgical CAD/CAM) and surgical assistance. In subsequent sections, we provide an overview of the technology ofmedical robot systems and discuss examples of our basic system paradigms, with brief additional discussion topics of remote telesurgery and robotic surgical simulators. We conclude with some thoughts on future research directions and provide suggested further reading.

Intuitive Surgical Da Vinci single-port robotic system

Author  Intuitive Surgical

Video ID : 825

The movie shows a single-port version of the Da Vinci robot, with several flexible tools all passing through the same access tube.

Chapter 46 — Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Cyrill Stachniss, John J. Leonard and Sebastian Thrun

This chapter provides a comprehensive introduction in to the simultaneous localization and mapping problem, better known in its abbreviated form as SLAM. SLAM addresses the main perception problem of a robot navigating an unknown environment. While navigating the environment, the robot seeks to acquire a map thereof, and at the same time it wishes to localize itself using its map. The use of SLAM problems can be motivated in two different ways: one might be interested in detailed environment models, or one might seek to maintain an accurate sense of a mobile robot’s location. SLAM serves both of these purposes.

We review the three major paradigms from which many published methods for SLAM are derived: (1) the extended Kalman filter (EKF); (2) particle filtering; and (3) graph optimization. We also review recent work in three-dimensional (3-D) SLAM using visual and red green blue distance-sensors (RGB-D), and close with a discussion of open research problems in robotic mapping.

DTAM: Dense tracking and mapping in real-time

Author  Richard Newcombe

Video ID : 452

This video shows DTAM: Dense tracking and mapping in real-time, a system for real-time, fully-dense visual tracking and reconstruction, described in Chap. 46.4, Springer Handbook of Robotics, 2nd edn (2016). Reference: R.A. Newcombe, S.J. Lovegrove, A.J. Davison: DTAM: Dense tracking and mapping in real-time. Int. Conf. Computer Vision (ICCV),, Barcelona (2011), pp. 2320–2327

Chapter 62 — Intelligent Vehicles

Alberto Broggi, Alex Zelinsky, Ümit Özgüner and Christian Laugier

This chapter describes the emerging robotics application field of intelligent vehicles – motor vehicles that have autonomous functions and capabilities. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 62.1 provides a motivation for why the development of intelligent vehicles is important, a brief history of the field, and the potential benefits of the technology. Section 62.2 describes the technologies that enable intelligent vehicles to sense vehicle, environment, and driver state, work with digital maps and satellite navigation, and communicate with intelligent transportation infrastructure. Section 62.3 describes the challenges and solutions associated with road scene understanding – a key capability for all intelligent vehicles. Section 62.4 describes advanced driver assistance systems, which use the robotics and sensing technologies described earlier to create new safety and convenience systems for motor vehicles, such as collision avoidance, lane keeping, and parking assistance. Section 62.5 describes driver monitoring technologies that are being developed to mitigate driver fatigue, inattention, and impairment. Section 62.6 describes fully autonomous intelligent vehicles systems that have been developed and deployed. The chapter is concluded in Sect. 62.7 with a discussion of future prospects, while Sect. 62.8 provides references to further reading and additional resources.

Collision avoidance at blind intersections using V2V and intention / expectation approach (Inria & Renault)

Author  Christian Laugier, Stephanie Lefevre

Video ID : 822

This video shows how collisions can be avoided at a blind intersection, by using vehicle-to-vehicle communications and by comparing the inferred intentions of drivers and their expected behaviors. More details can be found in [62.26].

Chapter 72 — Social Robotics

Cynthia Breazeal, Kerstin Dautenhahn and Takayuki Kanda

This chapter surveys some of the principal research trends in Social Robotics and its application to human–robot interaction (HRI). Social (or Sociable) robots are designed to interact with people in a natural, interpersonal manner – often to achieve positive outcomes in diverse applications such as education, health, quality of life, entertainment, communication, and tasks requiring collaborative teamwork. The long-term goal of creating social robots that are competent and capable partners for people is quite a challenging task. They will need to be able to communicate naturally with people using both verbal and nonverbal signals. They will need to engage us not only on a cognitive level, but on an emotional level as well in order to provide effective social and task-related support to people. They will need a wide range of socialcognitive skills and a theory of other minds to understand human behavior, and to be intuitively understood by people. A deep understanding of human intelligence and behavior across multiple dimensions (i. e., cognitive, affective, physical, social, etc.) is necessary in order to design robots that can successfully play a beneficial role in the daily lives of people. This requires a multidisciplinary approach where the design of social robot technologies and methodologies are informed by robotics, artificial intelligence, psychology, neuroscience, human factors, design, anthropology, and more.

A robot that exhibits its listening attitude with its motion

Author  Takayuki Kanda

Video ID : 810

This video demonstrates behavior of a robot developed to exhibit its listening attitude. Its behavior was modeled on humans' behavior, who were listening to directions. It was found that listening people often exhibit motions that are similar to speaking people. For instance, when a speaking person points in a direction, the listener also points in the same direction. Similar synchronized motions were found in eye-gaze and standing direction. The robot exhibited motions based on such human behaviors.

Chapter 71 — Cognitive Human-Robot Interaction

Bilge Mutlu, Nicholas Roy and Selma Šabanović

A key research challenge in robotics is to design robotic systems with the cognitive capabilities necessary to support human–robot interaction. These systems will need to have appropriate representations of the world; the task at hand; the capabilities, expectations, and actions of their human counterparts; and how their own actions might affect the world, their task, and their human partners. Cognitive human–robot interaction is a research area that considers human(s), robot(s), and their joint actions as a cognitive system and seeks to create models, algorithms, and design guidelines to enable the design of such systems. Core research activities in this area include the development of representations and actions that allow robots to participate in joint activities with people; a deeper understanding of human expectations and cognitive responses to robot actions; and, models of joint activity for human–robot interaction. This chapter surveys these research activities by drawing on research questions and advances from a wide range of fields including computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, and robotics.

Gaze and gesture cues for robots

Author  Bilge Mutlu

Video ID : 128

In human-robot communication, nonverbal cues like gaze and gesture can be a source of important information for starting and maintaining interaction. Gaze, for example, can tell a person about what the robot is attending to, its mental state, and its role in a conversation. Researchers are studying and developing models of nonverbal cues in human-robot interaction to enable more successful collaboration between robots and humans in a variety of domains, including education.

Chapter 76 — Evolutionary Robotics

Stefano Nolfi, Josh Bongard, Phil Husbands and Dario Floreano

Evolutionary Robotics is a method for automatically generating artificial brains and morphologies of autonomous robots. This approach is useful both for investigating the design space of robotic applications and for testing scientific hypotheses of biological mechanisms and processes. In this chapter we provide an overview of methods and results of Evolutionary Robotics with robots of different shapes, dimensions, and operation features. We consider both simulated and physical robots with special consideration to the transfer between the two worlds.

Visual navigation with collision avoidance

Author  Dario Floreano

Video ID : 37

Evolved Khepera displaying vision-based collision avoidance. A network of spiking neurons is evolved to drive the vision-based robot in the arena. A llight below the rotating contacts enables continuous evolution, even overnight.