Abstract. The swarm intelligence paradigm has proven to have very interesting properties such as robustness, flexibility and ability to solve complex problems exploiting parallelism and self-organization. Several robotics implementations of this paradigm confirm that these properties can be exploited for the control of a population of physically independent mobile robots.The work presented here introduces a new robotic concept called swarm-bot in which the collective interaction exploited by the swarm intelligence mechanism goes beyond the control layer and is extended to the physical level. This implies the addition of new mechanical functionalities on the single robot, together with new electronics and software to manage it. These new functionalities, even if not directly related to mobility and navigation, allow to address complex mobile robotics problems, such as extreme all-terrain exploration.The work shows also how this new concept is investigated using a simulation tool (swarmbot3d) specifically developed for quickly designing and evaluating new control algorithms. Experimental work shows how the simulated detailed representation of one s-bot has been calibrated to match the behaviour of the real robot.

Given the high occurence rate in assembly industry, mating a peg into a hole can be considered as one of the most classic problem in robotics. Such a task has been extensively examined by many researchers who have repeatedly attempted to find out a general solution for it. Peg in hole, which is, needlessly to mention, extremely trivial for any human operator, is surprisingly difficult to have it carried out by a robot manipulator. The reason is partly due to a physical limitation of the mechanical compliance of the robot wrist and arm and partly to a lack of a mating strategy allowing the successful execution of the task whatever the initial position of peg and hole axes is. The work presented in this paper tackles a particular class of peg-in-hole (tandem peg-in-hole) and proposes within the behaviour-based paradigm a solution to its two main components (hole search and peg insertion) loosely modeled on the equivalent strategies performed by a blind human being in possess solely of the same sensing capability (i.e. a simple differential touch sensor).

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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to address the online localization of mobile (service) robots in real world dynamic environments. Most of the techniques developed so far have been designed for static environments. What is presented here is a novel technique for mobile robot localization in quasi-dynamic environments. Design/methodology/approach -The proposed approach employs a probability grid map and Baye's filtering techniques. The former is used for representing the possible changes in the surrounding environment which a robot might have to face. Findings -Simulation and experimental results show that this approach has a high degree of robustness by taking into account both sensor and world uncertainty. The methodology has been tested under different environment scenarios where diverse complex objects having different sizes and shapes were used to represent movable and non-movable entities. Practical implications -The results can be applied to diverse robotic systems that need to move in changing indoor environments such as hospitals and places where people might require assistance from autonomous robotic devices. The methodology is fast, efficient and can be used in fast-moving robots, allowing them to perform complex operations such as path planning and navigation in real time. Originality/value -What is proposed here is a novel mobile robot localization approach that enables unmanned vehicles to effectively move in real time and know their current location in dynamic environments. Such an approach consists of two steps: a generation of the probability grid map; and a recursive position estimation methodology employing a variant of the Baye's filter.