Automatic Waypoint Generation to Improve Robot Navigation Through Narrow Spaces.

In domestic robotics, passing through narrow areas becomes critical for safe and effective robot navigation. Due to factors like sensor noise or miscalibration, even if the free space is sufficient for the robot to pass through, it may not see enough clearance to navigate, hence limiting its operational space. An approach to facing this is to insert waypoints strategically placed within the problematic areas in the map, which are considered by the robot planner when generating a trajectory and help to successfully traverse them.

Olfaction, Vision, and Semantics for Mobile Robots. Results of the IRO Project.

Olfaction is a valuable source of information about the environment that has not been sufficiently exploited in mobile robotics yet. Certainly, odor information can contribute to other sensing modalities, e.g.

A Semantic-Based Gas Source Localization with a Mobile Robot Combining Vision and Chemical Sensing.

This paper addresses the localization of a gas emission source within a real-world human environment with a mobile robot. Our approach is based on an efficient and coherent system that fuses different sensor modalities (i.e.

Multihierarchical interactive task planning: application to mobile robotics.

To date, no solution has been proposed to human-machine interactive task planning that deals simultaneously with two important issues: 1) the capability of processing large amounts of information in planning (as it is needed in any real application) and 2) being efficient in human-machine communication (a proper set of symbols for human-machine interaction may not be suitable for efficient automatic planning and vice versa). In this paper, we formalize a symbolic model of the environment to solve these issues in a natural form through a human-inspired mechanism that structures knowledge in multiple hierarchies. Planning with a hierarchical model may be efficient even in cases where the lack of hierarchical information would make it intractable.

Life-long optimization of the symbolic model of indoor environments for a mobile robot.

The use of a symbolic model of the spatial environment becomes crucial for a mobile robot that is intended to operate optimally and intelligently in indoor scenarios. Constructing such a model involves important problems that are not solved completely at present. One is called anchoring, which implies to maintain a correct dynamic correspondence between the real world and the symbols in the model.

Control architecture for human-robot integration: application to a robotic wheelchair.

Completely autonomous performance of a mobile robot within noncontrolled and dynamic environments is not possible yet due to different reasons including environment uncertainty, sensor/software robustness, limited robotic abilities, etc. But in assistant applications in which a human is always present, she/he can make up for the lack of robot autonomy by helping it when needed. In this paper, the authors propose human-robot integration as a mechanism to augment/improve the robot autonomy in daily scenarios.