No abstract

This paper presents an integrated exploration approach for geometric mapping and surface material-type identification of complex three-dimensional (3D) environments using a six-degree-of-freedom industrial robot manipulator. Maps of the surface geometry with the surface material type identified are required for an autonomous robotic system to perform operations in steel bridge maintenance. The proposed approach utilizes information theory to enable multiobjective exploration while new 3D geometric and surface-type data are fused via probabilistic updates. It is verified that the integrated approach enables the robotic system to perform exploration and surface inspection in real-world environments.C 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

No abstract

Ensuring that a particular and unsuspecting member of a group is the recipient of a salient-item hand-over is a complicated interaction. The robot must effectively, expediently and reliably communicate its intentions to advert any tendency within the group towards antinormative behaviour. In this paper, we study how a robot can establish the participant roles of such an interaction using imitated social and contextual cues. We designed two gaze cues, the first was designed to discourage antinormative behaviour through individualising a particular member of the group and the other to the contrary. We designed and conducted a field experiment (456 participants in 64 trials) in which small groups of people (between 3 and 20 people) assembled in front of the robot, which then attempted to pass a salient object to a particular group member by presenting a physical cue, followed by one of two variations of a gaze cue. Our results showed that presenting the individualising cue had a significant (z=3.733, p=0.0002 ) effect on the robot's ability to ensure that an arbitrary group member did not take the salient object and that the selected participant did.

No abstract