Mutual Shaping in Swarm Robotics: User Studies in Fire and Rescue, Storage Organization, and Bridge Inspection.

Many real-world applications have been suggested in the swarm robotics literature. However, there is a general lack of understanding of what needs to be done for robot swarms to be useful and trusted by users in reality. This paper aims to investigate user perception of robot swarms in the workplace, and inform design principles for the deployment of future swarms in real-world applications.

Morphogenesis in robot swarms.

Morphogenesis allows millions of cells to self-organize into intricate structures with a wide variety of functional shapes during embryonic development. This process emerges from local interactions of cells under the control of gene circuits that are identical in every cell, robust to intrinsic noise, and adaptable to changing environments. Constructing human technology with these properties presents an important opportunity in swarm robotic applications ranging from construction to exploration.

Vehicle Maneuver Detection with Accelerometer-Based Classification.

In the mobile computing era, smartphones have become instrumental tools to develop innovative mobile context-aware systems. In that sense, their usage in the vehicular domain eases the development of novel and personal transportation solutions. In this frame, the present work introduces an innovative mechanism to perceive the current kinematic state of a vehicle on the basis of the accelerometer data from a smartphone mounted in the vehicle.