Autonomous RobotsPub Date : 2024-01-28DOI: 10.1007/s10514-023-10155-z
Siro Moreno-Martín, Lluís Ros, Enric Celaya
{"title":"Collocation methods for second and higher order systems","authors":"Siro Moreno-Martín, Lluís Ros, Enric Celaya","doi":"10.1007/s10514-023-10155-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-023-10155-z","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>It is often unnoticed that the predominant way to use collocation methods is fundamentally flawed when applied to optimal control in robotics. Such methods assume that the system dynamics is given by a first order ODE, whereas robots are often governed by a second or higher order ODE involving configuration variables and their time derivatives. To apply a collocation method, therefore, the usual practice is to resort to the well known procedure of casting an <i>M</i>th order ODE into <i>M</i> first order ones. This manipulation, which in the continuous domain is perfectly valid, leads to inconsistencies when the problem is discretized. Since the configuration variables and their time derivatives are approximated with polynomials of the same degree, their differential dependencies cannot be fulfilled, and the actual dynamics is not satisfied, not even at the collocation points. This paper draws attention to this problem, and develops improved versions of the trapezoidal and Hermite–Simpson collocation methods that do not present these inconsistencies. In many cases, the new methods reduce the dynamics transcription error in one order of magnitude, or even more, without noticeably increasing the cost of computing the solutions.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10514-023-10155-z.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139579306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Boosting the hospital by integrating mobile robotic assistance systems: a comprehensive classification of the risks to be addressed","authors":"Lukas Bernhard, Patrik Schwingenschlögl, Jörg Hofmann, Dirk Wilhelm, Alois Knoll","doi":"10.1007/s10514-023-10154-0","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-023-10154-0","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Mobile service robots are a promising technology for supporting workflows throughout the hospital. Combined with an understanding of the environment and the current situation, such systems have the potential to become invaluable tools for overcoming personal shortages and streamlining healthcare workflows. However, few robotic systems have actually been translated to practical application so far, which is due to many challenges centered around the strict and unique requirements imposed by the different hospital environments, which have not yet been collected and analyzed in a structured manner. To address this need, we now present a comprehensive classification of different dimensions of risk to be considered when designing mobile service robots for the hospital. Our classification consists of six risk categories – environmental complexity, hygienic requirements, interaction with persons and objects, workflow flexibility and autonomy – for each of which a scale with distinct risk levels is provided. This concept, for the first time allows for a precise classification of mobile service robots for the hospital, which can prove useful for certification and admission procedures as well as for defining architectural and safety requirements throughout the design process of such robots.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10514-023-10154-0.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139558975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Autonomous RobotsPub Date : 2023-11-23DOI: 10.1007/s10514-023-10142-4
Matthew O’Brien, Jason Williams, Shengkang Chen, Alex Pitt, Ronald Arkin, Navinda Kottege
{"title":"Dynamic task allocation approaches for coordinated exploration of Subterranean environments","authors":"Matthew O’Brien, Jason Williams, Shengkang Chen, Alex Pitt, Ronald Arkin, Navinda Kottege","doi":"10.1007/s10514-023-10142-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-023-10142-4","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper presents the methods used by team CSIRO Data61 for multi-agent coordination and exploration in the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. The SubT competition involved a single operator sending teams of robots to rapidly explore underground environments with severe navigation and communication challenges. Coordination was framed as a multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) problem to allow for a seamless integration of exploration with other required tasks. Methods for extending a consensus-based task allocation approach for an online and highly dynamic mission are discussed. Exploration tasks were generated from frontiers in a map of traversable space, and graph-based heuristics applied to guide the selection of exploration tasks. Results from simulation, field testing, and the final competition are presented. Team CSIRO Data61 tied for most points scored and achieved second place during the final SubT event.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"47 8","pages":"1559 - 1577"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138473082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Autonomous RobotsPub Date : 2023-11-17DOI: 10.1007/s10514-023-10153-1
{"title":"AuRo special issue on large language models in robotics guest editorial","authors":"","doi":"10.1007/s10514-023-10153-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-023-10153-1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"47 8","pages":"979 - 980"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138473235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Autonomous RobotsPub Date : 2023-11-16DOI: 10.1007/s10514-023-10139-z
Jimmy Wu, Rika Antonova, Adam Kan, Marion Lepert, Andy Zeng, Shuran Song, Jeannette Bohg, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Thomas Funkhouser
{"title":"TidyBot: personalized robot assistance with large language models","authors":"Jimmy Wu, Rika Antonova, Adam Kan, Marion Lepert, Andy Zeng, Shuran Song, Jeannette Bohg, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Thomas Funkhouser","doi":"10.1007/s10514-023-10139-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-023-10139-z","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>For a robot to personalize physical assistance effectively, it must learn user preferences that can be generally reapplied to future scenarios. In this work, we investigate personalization of household cleanup with robots that can tidy up rooms by picking up objects and putting them away. A key challenge is determining the proper place to put each object, as people’s preferences can vary greatly depending on personal taste or cultural background. For instance, one person may prefer storing shirts in the drawer, while another may prefer them on the shelf. We aim to build systems that can learn such preferences from just a handful of examples via prior interactions with a particular person. We show that robots can combine language-based planning and perception with the few-shot summarization capabilities of large language models to infer generalized user preferences that are broadly applicable to future interactions. This approach enables fast adaptation and achieves 91.2% accuracy on unseen objects in our benchmark dataset. We also demonstrate our approach on a real-world mobile manipulator called TidyBot, which successfully puts away 85.0% of objects in real-world test scenarios.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"47 8","pages":"1087 - 1102"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138473086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Autonomous RobotsPub Date : 2023-11-16DOI: 10.1007/s10514-023-10134-4
Chad DeChant, Iretiayo Akinola, Daniel Bauer
{"title":"Learning to summarize and answer questions about a virtual robot’s past actions","authors":"Chad DeChant, Iretiayo Akinola, Daniel Bauer","doi":"10.1007/s10514-023-10134-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-023-10134-4","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>When robots perform long action sequences, users will want to easily and reliably find out what they have done. We therefore demonstrate the task of learning to summarize and answer questions about a robot agent’s past actions using natural language alone. A single system with a large language model at its core is trained to both summarize and answer questions about action sequences given ego-centric video frames of a virtual robot and a question prompt. To enable training of question answering, we develop a method to automatically generate English-language questions and answers about objects, actions, and the temporal order in which actions occurred during episodes of robot action in the virtual environment. Training one model to both summarize and answer questions enables zero-shot transfer of representations of objects learned through question answering to improved action summarization. \u0000</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"47 8","pages":"1103 - 1118"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10514-023-10134-4.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138473077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Autonomous RobotsPub Date : 2023-11-14DOI: 10.1007/s10514-023-10131-7
Kevin Lin, Christopher Agia, Toki Migimatsu, Marco Pavone, Jeannette Bohg
{"title":"Text2Motion: from natural language instructions to feasible plans","authors":"Kevin Lin, Christopher Agia, Toki Migimatsu, Marco Pavone, Jeannette Bohg","doi":"10.1007/s10514-023-10131-7","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-023-10131-7","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We propose Text2Motion, a language-based planning framework enabling robots to solve sequential manipulation tasks that require long-horizon reasoning. Given a natural language instruction, our framework constructs both a task- and motion-level plan that is verified to reach inferred symbolic goals. Text2Motion uses feasibility heuristics encoded in Q-functions of a library of skills to guide task planning with Large Language Models. Whereas previous language-based planners only consider the feasibility of individual skills, Text2Motion actively resolves geometric dependencies spanning skill sequences by performing geometric feasibility planning during its search. We evaluate our method on a suite of problems that require long-horizon reasoning, interpretation of abstract goals, and handling of partial affordance perception. Our experiments show that Text2Motion can solve these challenging problems with a success rate of 82%, while prior state-of-the-art language-based planning methods only achieve 13%. Text2Motion thus provides promising generalization characteristics to semantically diverse sequential manipulation tasks with geometric dependencies between skills. Qualitative results are made available at https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/text2motion.\u0000</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"47 8","pages":"1345 - 1365"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134954182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Autonomous RobotsPub Date : 2023-11-09DOI: 10.1007/s10514-023-10151-3
{"title":"Editor’s note - Special issue on Robot Swarms in the Real World: from Design to Deployment","authors":"","doi":"10.1007/s10514-023-10151-3","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-023-10151-3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"47 7","pages":"831 - 831"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135192291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Autonomous RobotsPub Date : 2023-11-03DOI: 10.1007/s10514-023-10145-1
Christian Pek, Georg Friedrich Schuppe, Francesco Esposito, Jana Tumova, Danica Kragic
{"title":"SpaTiaL: monitoring and planning of robotic tasks using spatio-temporal logic specifications","authors":"Christian Pek, Georg Friedrich Schuppe, Francesco Esposito, Jana Tumova, Danica Kragic","doi":"10.1007/s10514-023-10145-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10514-023-10145-1","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Many tasks require robots to manipulate objects while satisfying a complex interplay of spatial and temporal constraints. For instance, a table setting robot first needs to place a mug and then fill it with coffee, while satisfying spatial relations such as forks need to placed left of plates. We propose the spatio-temporal framework SpaTiaL that unifies the specification, monitoring, and planning of object-oriented robotic tasks in a robot-agnostic fashion. SpaTiaL is able to specify diverse spatial relations between objects and temporal task patterns. Our experiments with recorded data, simulations, and real robots demonstrate how SpaTiaL provides real-time monitoring and facilitates online planning. SpaTiaL is open source and easily expandable to new object relations and robotic applications.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55409,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Robots","volume":"47 8","pages":"1439 - 1462"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10514-023-10145-1.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135820615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}