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D. Nardi

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Valeria de Paiva

University of Birmingham

University Politehnica of Bucharest

Ezequiel Di Paolo

Ikerbasque

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

Norbertus Tri Suswanto Saptadi

Universitas Atma Jaya Makassar

Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille (Lille-1)

Bálint Molnár

Eötvös Loránd University

University of Cincinnati

Marjorie Skubic

University of Missouri Columbia

University of East London

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Papers by D. Nardi

Dynamic token generation for constrained tasks in a multi-robot system

2004 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37583)

The problem of assigning tasks to a group of robots acting in a dynamic environment is a fundamen... more The problem of assigning tasks to a group of robots acting in a dynamic environment is a fundamental issue for a MRS and is relevant to several real world applications. Several techniques have been studied to address this problem, however when the system needs to scale up with size, communication quickly becomes an important issue to address; moreover, tasks to

S. Al-Hasan and G. Vachtsevanos Intelligent route planning for fast autonomous vehicles operating in a large natural terrain 1 E. Prestes e Silva Jr., PM Engel, M. Trevisan and MAP Idiart Exploration method using harmonic functions 25

HuRIC: a Human Robot Interaction Corpus

Recent years show the development of large scale resources (e.g. FrameNet for the Frame Semantics... more Recent years show the development of large scale resources (e.g. FrameNet for the Frame Semantics) that supported the definition of several state-of-the-art approaches in Natural Language Processing. However, the reuse of existing resources in heterogeneous domains such as Human Robot Interaction is not straightforward. The generalization offered by many data driven methods is strongly biased by the employed data, whose performance in out-of-domain conditions exhibit large drops. In this paper, we present the Human Robot Interaction Corpus (HuRIC). It is made of audio files paired with their transcriptions referring to commands for a robot, e.g. in a home environment. The recorded sentences are annotated with different kinds of linguistic information, ranging from morphological and syntactic information to rich semantic information, according to the Frame Semantics, to characterize robot actions, and Spatial Semantics, to capture the robot environment. All texts are represented through the Abstract Meaning Representation, to adopt a simple but expressive representation of commands, that can be more easily translated into the internal representation of the robot.

$Research paper thumbnail of Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Universit a di Roma\ La Sapienza" via Salaria 113, I-00198 Roma, ITALY tel:+ 39.6. 4991-8340, fax:+ 39.6. 8442-383 e-mail: massacci@ dis. uniroma1. it$

Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Universit a di Roma\ La Sapienza" via Salaria 113, I-00198 Roma, ITALY tel:+ 39.6. 4991-8340, fax:+ 39.6. 8442-383 e-mail: massacci@ dis. uniroma1. it

this paper we propose a concept language with an epistemic operator interpreted in terms of minim... more this paper we propose a concept language with an epistemic operator interpreted in terms of minimal knowledge [8, 6, 11], and we show that it provides an adequate treatment of the following features: defaults, procedural rules, weak definitions and role closures, as they are provided in the most popular systems based on concept languages. The intuitive reason that makes our approach suitable for a precise characterization of the behaviour of implemented systems is that the minimization of knowledge on possible world structures carries

International Workshop on Description Logics : Bonn, May 28/29, 1994

ion is a weil known mechanism in reasoning about individuals in concept-based systems. It consist... more ion is a weil known mechanism in reasoning about individuals in concept-based systems. It consists in retrieving all the assertions relevant to a given individual a and collecting them into a single concept. Such concept has the property of being the most specific concept (expressible in the language) such that the individual a is an instance of. For this reason it is generally indicated by MSC(a) (Most Specific Concept). Abstraction, together with subsumption, allows one to perform instance checking. In fact, an algorithm for checking whether A 1= C(a) can work as follows: Step 1. compute MSC(a). Step 2. check whether C subsurnes MSC(a). This algorithm, called Abstraction/Subsumption, has been broadly exploited in actual systems (see [Quantz and Kindermann,1990; Nebel,1990]) . However, the problem of exploiting this algorithm is that, in general, it is not possible to completely fit in the information relevant to an individual into a single concept of the language. Let us clarify t...

Source integration in data warehousing

Proceedings Ninth International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (Cat. No.98EX130)

Information integration is one of the most important aspects of a Data Warehouse. When data passe... more Information integration is one of the most important aspects of a Data Warehouse. When data passes from the sources of the application-oriented operational environment to the Data Warehouse, possible inconsistencies and redundancies should be resolved, so that the warehouse is able to provide an integrated and reconciled view of data of the organization. We describe a novel approach to data integration in Data Warehousing. Our approach is based on a conceptual representation of the Data Warehouse application domain, and follows the so-called local-as-view paradigm: both source and Data Warehouse relations are defined as views over the conceptual model. We propose a technique for declaratively specifying suitable reconciliation correspondences to be used in order to solve conflicts among data in different sources. The main goal of the method is to support the design of mediators that materialize the data in the Data Warehouse relations. Starting from the specification of one such relation as a query over the conceptual model, a rewriting algorithm reformulates the query in terms of both the source relations and the reconciliation correspondences, thus obtaining a correct specification of how to load the data in the materialized view.

Automatic Extraction of Structural Representations of Environments

Intelligent Autonomous Systems 13, 2015

Robots need a suitable representation of the surrounding world to operate in a structured but dyn... more Robots need a suitable representation of the surrounding world to operate in a structured but dynamic environment. State-of-theart approaches usually rely on a combination of metric and topological maps and require an expert to provide the knowledge to the robot in a suitable format. Therefore, additional symbolic knowledge cannot be easily added to the representation in an incremental manner. This work deals with the problem of effectively binding together the high-level semantic information with the low-level knowledge represented in the metric map by introducing an intermediate grid based representation. In order to demonstrate its effectiveness, the proposed approach has been experimentally validated on different kinds of environments.

RoboCup@Home Spoken Corpus: Using Robotic Competitions for Gathering Datasets

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015

The definition of high quality datasets for benchmarking single components and entire systems in ... more The definition of high quality datasets for benchmarking single components and entire systems in intelligent robots is a fundamental task for developing, testing and comparing different technical solutions. In this paper, we describe the methodology adopted for the acquisition and the creation of a spoken corpus for domestic and service robots. The corpus has been inspired by and acquired in the RoboCup@Home setting, with the involvement of RoboCup@Home participants. The annotated data set is publicly available for developing, testing and comparing speech understanding functionalities of domestic and service robots, not only for teams involved in RoboCup@Home or in other competitions, but also for research groups active in the field. We regard the construction of the dataset as a first step towards a full benchmarking methodology for spoken language interaction in service robotics.

On-line robot execution monitoring using probabilistic action duration

Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems/Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, 2010

The execution of tasks for a mobile robot embedded in a dynamic environment brings about several ... more The execution of tasks for a mobile robot embedded in a dynamic environment brings about several challenges, due to the dynamic changes of the environment and the inaccurate perception of the robot. This paper tackles the problem of on-line execution monitoring when the agent has different tasks and several plan to accomplish them, as in the BDI framework. Our method considers uncertainty in the duration of actions with a probabilistic model of action duration, and evaluates the cost of each possible plan at run-time in terms of probability of successful termination within a desired expected time.

Policy gradient learning for quadruped soccer robots

Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2010

In real-world robotic applications, many factors, both at low-level (e.g., vision, motion control... more In real-world robotic applications, many factors, both at low-level (e.g., vision, motion control and behaviors) and at high-level (e.g., plans and strategies) determine the quality of the robot performance. Consequently, fine tuning of the parameters, in the implementation of the basic functionalities, as well as in the strategic decisions, is a key issue in robot software development. In recent years, machine learning techniques have been successfully used to find optimal parameters for typical robotic functionalities. However, one major drawback of learning techniques is time consumption: in practical applications, methods designed for physical robots must be effective with small amounts of data. In this paper, we present a method for concurrent learning of best strategy and optimal parameters using policy gradient reinforcement learning algorithm. The results of our experimental work in a simulated environment and on a real robot show a very high convergence rate.

Task Assignment with Dynamic Perception and Constrained Tasks in a Multi-Robot System

Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

In this paper we present an asynchronous distributed mechanism for allocating tasks in a team of ... more In this paper we present an asynchronous distributed mechanism for allocating tasks in a team of robots. Tasks to be allocated are dynamically perceived from the environment and can be tied by execution constraints. Conflicts among team mates arise when an uncontrolled number of robots execute the same task, resulting in waste of effort and spatial conflicts. The critical aspect of Multi Robot Systems with respect to task allocation methods in Multi Agent Systems is related to conflicts generated by limited and erroneous perception capabilities of real robots. The proposed approach is able to successfully allocate roles to robots avoiding conflicts among team mates and maintaining low communication overhead. We implemented our method on AIBO robots and performed quantitative analysis in a simulated environment.

A probabilistic action duration model for plan selection and monitoring

2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2010

The execution of tasks for a robotic agent embedded in a dynamic environment brings about several... more The execution of tasks for a robotic agent embedded in a dynamic environment brings about several challenges, due to unpredictable (or unobservable) events, and to inaccurate perception. Moreover, the agent can perform multiple tasks and each task can be achieved by applying different plans, therefore the decision about which strategy is the most convenient, given the current situation of the world, is important for assessing an intelligent overall behavior of the agent. This paper tackles the problem of on-line execution monitoring in a novel way with respect to previous work, since: 1) it considers uncertainty in the duration of actions with a probabilistic model of action duration; 2) it evaluates the cost of each possible plan at run-time in terms of probability of successful termination within a desired expected time. The approach has been evaluated both in a robotic soccer and a surveillance scenario.

Reactivity and Deliberation: A Survey on Multi-Robot Systems

Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems, 2001

Multi Robot Systems are, nowadays, an important research area within Robotics and Artificial Inte... more Multi Robot Systems are, nowadays, an important research area within Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Although Multi Robot Systems can be regarded as a particular case of Multi Agent Systems, it seems appropriate to study the Multi Robot Systems from a specific viewpoint, because of the issues which arise from the embodiment of agents operating in real environments. In this paper, we present an analysis of Multi Robot Systems by looking at their cooperative aspects. In particular, we propose a taxonomy of Multi Robot Systems and a characterization of reactive and social deliberative behaviors of the Multi Robot System as a whole. Finally, we address some Multi Robot Systems, which we consider representative of the various nodes in our taxonomy.

Ground Truth Acquisition of Humanoid Soccer Robot Behaviour

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

In this paper an open source software for monitoring humanoid soccer robot behaviours is presente... more In this paper an open source software for monitoring humanoid soccer robot behaviours is presented. The software is part of an easy to set up system, conceived for registering ground truth data that can be used for evaluating and testing methods such as robot coordination and localization. The hardware architecture of the system is designed for using multiple low-cost visual sensors (four Kinects). The software includes a foreground computation module and a detection unit for both players and ball. A graphical user interface has been developed in order to facilitate the creation of a shared multi-camera plan view, in which the observations of players and ball are re-projected to obtain global positions. The effectiveness of the implemented system has been proven using a laser sensor to measure the exact position of the objects of interest in the field.

Multi-robot Teams for Environmental Monitoring

Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2011

In this chapter we target the problem of monitoring an environment with a team of mobile robots h... more In this chapter we target the problem of monitoring an environment with a team of mobile robots having on board video-cameras and fixed stereo cameras available within the environment. Current research regards homogeneous robots, whereas in this chapter we study highly heterogeneous systems and consider the problem of patrolling an area with a dynamic set of agents. The system presented in the chapter provides enhanced multi-robot coordination and vision-based activity monitoring techniques. The main objective is the integration and development of coordination techniques for multi-robot environment coverage, with the goal of maximizing the quality of information gathered from a given area thus, implementing a Heterogeneous mobile and reconfigurable multi-camera video-surveillance system.

RoCKIn Innovation Through Robot Competitions [Competitions]

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 2014

Cooperative situation assessment in a maritime scenario

International Journal of Intelligent Systems, 2012

In large-scale, complex domains such as space defense and security systems, situation assessment ... more In large-scale, complex domains such as space defense and security systems, situation assessment and decision making are evolving from centralized models to high-level, net-centric models. In this context, collaboration among the many actors involved in the situation assessment process is critical in order to achieve a prompt reaction as needed in the operational scenario. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent based approach to situation assessment, where agents cooperate by sharing local information to reach a common and coherent assessment of situations. Specifically, we characterize situation assessment as a classification process based on OWL ontology reasoning, and we provide a protocol for cooperative multi-agent situation assessment, which allows the agents to achieve coherent high level conclusions. We validate our approach in a real maritime surveillance scenario, where our prototype system effectively supports the user in detecting and classifying potential threats; moreover, our distributed solution performs comparably to a centralized method, while preserving independence of decision makers and dramatically reducing the amount of communication required.

A robotic soccer passing task using petri net plans

Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems/Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, 2008

The complexity of existential quantification in concept languages

Artificial Intelligence, 1992

Solving disagreements in a multi-agent system performing Situation Assessment

Dynamic token generation for constrained tasks in a multi-robot system

2004 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37583)

The problem of assigning tasks to a group of robots acting in a dynamic environment is a fundamen... more The problem of assigning tasks to a group of robots acting in a dynamic environment is a fundamental issue for a MRS and is relevant to several real world applications. Several techniques have been studied to address this problem, however when the system needs to scale up with size, communication quickly becomes an important issue to address; moreover, tasks to

S. Al-Hasan and G. Vachtsevanos Intelligent route planning for fast autonomous vehicles operating in a large natural terrain 1 E. Prestes e Silva Jr., PM Engel, M. Trevisan and MAP Idiart Exploration method using harmonic functions 25

HuRIC: a Human Robot Interaction Corpus

Recent years show the development of large scale resources (e.g. FrameNet for the Frame Semantics... more Recent years show the development of large scale resources (e.g. FrameNet for the Frame Semantics) that supported the definition of several state-of-the-art approaches in Natural Language Processing. However, the reuse of existing resources in heterogeneous domains such as Human Robot Interaction is not straightforward. The generalization offered by many data driven methods is strongly biased by the employed data, whose performance in out-of-domain conditions exhibit large drops. In this paper, we present the Human Robot Interaction Corpus (HuRIC). It is made of audio files paired with their transcriptions referring to commands for a robot, e.g. in a home environment. The recorded sentences are annotated with different kinds of linguistic information, ranging from morphological and syntactic information to rich semantic information, according to the Frame Semantics, to characterize robot actions, and Spatial Semantics, to capture the robot environment. All texts are represented through the Abstract Meaning Representation, to adopt a simple but expressive representation of commands, that can be more easily translated into the internal representation of the robot.

$Research paper thumbnail of Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Universit a di Roma\ La Sapienza" via Salaria 113, I-00198 Roma, ITALY tel:+ 39.6. 4991-8340, fax:+ 39.6. 8442-383 e-mail: massacci@ dis. uniroma1. it$

Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Universit a di Roma\ La Sapienza" via Salaria 113, I-00198 Roma, ITALY tel:+ 39.6. 4991-8340, fax:+ 39.6. 8442-383 e-mail: massacci@ dis. uniroma1. it

this paper we propose a concept language with an epistemic operator interpreted in terms of minim... more this paper we propose a concept language with an epistemic operator interpreted in terms of minimal knowledge [8, 6, 11], and we show that it provides an adequate treatment of the following features: defaults, procedural rules, weak definitions and role closures, as they are provided in the most popular systems based on concept languages. The intuitive reason that makes our approach suitable for a precise characterization of the behaviour of implemented systems is that the minimization of knowledge on possible world structures carries

International Workshop on Description Logics : Bonn, May 28/29, 1994

ion is a weil known mechanism in reasoning about individuals in concept-based systems. It consist... more ion is a weil known mechanism in reasoning about individuals in concept-based systems. It consists in retrieving all the assertions relevant to a given individual a and collecting them into a single concept. Such concept has the property of being the most specific concept (expressible in the language) such that the individual a is an instance of. For this reason it is generally indicated by MSC(a) (Most Specific Concept). Abstraction, together with subsumption, allows one to perform instance checking. In fact, an algorithm for checking whether A 1= C(a) can work as follows: Step 1. compute MSC(a). Step 2. check whether C subsurnes MSC(a). This algorithm, called Abstraction/Subsumption, has been broadly exploited in actual systems (see [Quantz and Kindermann,1990; Nebel,1990]) . However, the problem of exploiting this algorithm is that, in general, it is not possible to completely fit in the information relevant to an individual into a single concept of the language. Let us clarify t...

Source integration in data warehousing

Proceedings Ninth International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (Cat. No.98EX130)

Information integration is one of the most important aspects of a Data Warehouse. When data passe... more Information integration is one of the most important aspects of a Data Warehouse. When data passes from the sources of the application-oriented operational environment to the Data Warehouse, possible inconsistencies and redundancies should be resolved, so that the warehouse is able to provide an integrated and reconciled view of data of the organization. We describe a novel approach to data integration in Data Warehousing. Our approach is based on a conceptual representation of the Data Warehouse application domain, and follows the so-called local-as-view paradigm: both source and Data Warehouse relations are defined as views over the conceptual model. We propose a technique for declaratively specifying suitable reconciliation correspondences to be used in order to solve conflicts among data in different sources. The main goal of the method is to support the design of mediators that materialize the data in the Data Warehouse relations. Starting from the specification of one such relation as a query over the conceptual model, a rewriting algorithm reformulates the query in terms of both the source relations and the reconciliation correspondences, thus obtaining a correct specification of how to load the data in the materialized view.

Automatic Extraction of Structural Representations of Environments

Intelligent Autonomous Systems 13, 2015

Robots need a suitable representation of the surrounding world to operate in a structured but dyn... more Robots need a suitable representation of the surrounding world to operate in a structured but dynamic environment. State-of-theart approaches usually rely on a combination of metric and topological maps and require an expert to provide the knowledge to the robot in a suitable format. Therefore, additional symbolic knowledge cannot be easily added to the representation in an incremental manner. This work deals with the problem of effectively binding together the high-level semantic information with the low-level knowledge represented in the metric map by introducing an intermediate grid based representation. In order to demonstrate its effectiveness, the proposed approach has been experimentally validated on different kinds of environments.

RoboCup@Home Spoken Corpus: Using Robotic Competitions for Gathering Datasets

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015

The definition of high quality datasets for benchmarking single components and entire systems in ... more The definition of high quality datasets for benchmarking single components and entire systems in intelligent robots is a fundamental task for developing, testing and comparing different technical solutions. In this paper, we describe the methodology adopted for the acquisition and the creation of a spoken corpus for domestic and service robots. The corpus has been inspired by and acquired in the RoboCup@Home setting, with the involvement of RoboCup@Home participants. The annotated data set is publicly available for developing, testing and comparing speech understanding functionalities of domestic and service robots, not only for teams involved in RoboCup@Home or in other competitions, but also for research groups active in the field. We regard the construction of the dataset as a first step towards a full benchmarking methodology for spoken language interaction in service robotics.

On-line robot execution monitoring using probabilistic action duration

Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems/Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, 2010

The execution of tasks for a mobile robot embedded in a dynamic environment brings about several ... more The execution of tasks for a mobile robot embedded in a dynamic environment brings about several challenges, due to the dynamic changes of the environment and the inaccurate perception of the robot. This paper tackles the problem of on-line execution monitoring when the agent has different tasks and several plan to accomplish them, as in the BDI framework. Our method considers uncertainty in the duration of actions with a probabilistic model of action duration, and evaluates the cost of each possible plan at run-time in terms of probability of successful termination within a desired expected time.

Policy gradient learning for quadruped soccer robots

Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2010

In real-world robotic applications, many factors, both at low-level (e.g., vision, motion control... more In real-world robotic applications, many factors, both at low-level (e.g., vision, motion control and behaviors) and at high-level (e.g., plans and strategies) determine the quality of the robot performance. Consequently, fine tuning of the parameters, in the implementation of the basic functionalities, as well as in the strategic decisions, is a key issue in robot software development. In recent years, machine learning techniques have been successfully used to find optimal parameters for typical robotic functionalities. However, one major drawback of learning techniques is time consumption: in practical applications, methods designed for physical robots must be effective with small amounts of data. In this paper, we present a method for concurrent learning of best strategy and optimal parameters using policy gradient reinforcement learning algorithm. The results of our experimental work in a simulated environment and on a real robot show a very high convergence rate.

Task Assignment with Dynamic Perception and Constrained Tasks in a Multi-Robot System

Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

In this paper we present an asynchronous distributed mechanism for allocating tasks in a team of ... more In this paper we present an asynchronous distributed mechanism for allocating tasks in a team of robots. Tasks to be allocated are dynamically perceived from the environment and can be tied by execution constraints. Conflicts among team mates arise when an uncontrolled number of robots execute the same task, resulting in waste of effort and spatial conflicts. The critical aspect of Multi Robot Systems with respect to task allocation methods in Multi Agent Systems is related to conflicts generated by limited and erroneous perception capabilities of real robots. The proposed approach is able to successfully allocate roles to robots avoiding conflicts among team mates and maintaining low communication overhead. We implemented our method on AIBO robots and performed quantitative analysis in a simulated environment.

A probabilistic action duration model for plan selection and monitoring

2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2010

The execution of tasks for a robotic agent embedded in a dynamic environment brings about several... more The execution of tasks for a robotic agent embedded in a dynamic environment brings about several challenges, due to unpredictable (or unobservable) events, and to inaccurate perception. Moreover, the agent can perform multiple tasks and each task can be achieved by applying different plans, therefore the decision about which strategy is the most convenient, given the current situation of the world, is important for assessing an intelligent overall behavior of the agent. This paper tackles the problem of on-line execution monitoring in a novel way with respect to previous work, since: 1) it considers uncertainty in the duration of actions with a probabilistic model of action duration; 2) it evaluates the cost of each possible plan at run-time in terms of probability of successful termination within a desired expected time. The approach has been evaluated both in a robotic soccer and a surveillance scenario.

Reactivity and Deliberation: A Survey on Multi-Robot Systems

Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems, 2001

Multi Robot Systems are, nowadays, an important research area within Robotics and Artificial Inte... more Multi Robot Systems are, nowadays, an important research area within Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Although Multi Robot Systems can be regarded as a particular case of Multi Agent Systems, it seems appropriate to study the Multi Robot Systems from a specific viewpoint, because of the issues which arise from the embodiment of agents operating in real environments. In this paper, we present an analysis of Multi Robot Systems by looking at their cooperative aspects. In particular, we propose a taxonomy of Multi Robot Systems and a characterization of reactive and social deliberative behaviors of the Multi Robot System as a whole. Finally, we address some Multi Robot Systems, which we consider representative of the various nodes in our taxonomy.

Ground Truth Acquisition of Humanoid Soccer Robot Behaviour

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

In this paper an open source software for monitoring humanoid soccer robot behaviours is presente... more In this paper an open source software for monitoring humanoid soccer robot behaviours is presented. The software is part of an easy to set up system, conceived for registering ground truth data that can be used for evaluating and testing methods such as robot coordination and localization. The hardware architecture of the system is designed for using multiple low-cost visual sensors (four Kinects). The software includes a foreground computation module and a detection unit for both players and ball. A graphical user interface has been developed in order to facilitate the creation of a shared multi-camera plan view, in which the observations of players and ball are re-projected to obtain global positions. The effectiveness of the implemented system has been proven using a laser sensor to measure the exact position of the objects of interest in the field.

Multi-robot Teams for Environmental Monitoring

Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2011

In this chapter we target the problem of monitoring an environment with a team of mobile robots h... more In this chapter we target the problem of monitoring an environment with a team of mobile robots having on board video-cameras and fixed stereo cameras available within the environment. Current research regards homogeneous robots, whereas in this chapter we study highly heterogeneous systems and consider the problem of patrolling an area with a dynamic set of agents. The system presented in the chapter provides enhanced multi-robot coordination and vision-based activity monitoring techniques. The main objective is the integration and development of coordination techniques for multi-robot environment coverage, with the goal of maximizing the quality of information gathered from a given area thus, implementing a Heterogeneous mobile and reconfigurable multi-camera video-surveillance system.

RoCKIn Innovation Through Robot Competitions [Competitions]

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 2014

Cooperative situation assessment in a maritime scenario

International Journal of Intelligent Systems, 2012

In large-scale, complex domains such as space defense and security systems, situation assessment ... more In large-scale, complex domains such as space defense and security systems, situation assessment and decision making are evolving from centralized models to high-level, net-centric models. In this context, collaboration among the many actors involved in the situation assessment process is critical in order to achieve a prompt reaction as needed in the operational scenario. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent based approach to situation assessment, where agents cooperate by sharing local information to reach a common and coherent assessment of situations. Specifically, we characterize situation assessment as a classification process based on OWL ontology reasoning, and we provide a protocol for cooperative multi-agent situation assessment, which allows the agents to achieve coherent high level conclusions. We validate our approach in a real maritime surveillance scenario, where our prototype system effectively supports the user in detecting and classifying potential threats; moreover, our distributed solution performs comparably to a centralized method, while preserving independence of decision makers and dramatically reducing the amount of communication required.

A robotic soccer passing task using petri net plans

Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems/Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, 2008

The complexity of existential quantification in concept languages

Artificial Intelligence, 1992

Solving disagreements in a multi-agent system performing Situation Assessment