Robot–City Interaction: Mapping the Research Landscape—A Survey of the Interactions Between Robots and Modern Cities

Abstract

The goal of this work is to describe how robots interact with complex city environments, and to identify the main characteristics of an emerging field that we call Robot-City Interaction (RCI). Given the central role recently gained by modern cities as use cases for the deployment of advanced technologies, and the advancements achieved in the robotics field in recent years, we assume that there is an increasing interest both in integrating robots in urban ecosystems, and in studying how they can interact and benefit from each others. Therefore, our challenge becomes to verify the emergence of such area, to assess its current state and to identify the main characteristics, core themes and research challenges associated with it. This is achieved by reviewing a preliminary body of work contributing to this area, which we classify and analyze according to an analytical framework including a set of key dimensions for the area of RCI. Such review not only serves as a preliminary state-of-the-art in the area, but also allows us to identify the main characteristics of RCI and its research landscape.

Task-Agnostic Object Recognition for Mobile Robots through Few-Shot Image Matching

“…Following these advancements, the members of the European Public-Private Partnership in Robotics (SPARC) have defined a set of critical objectives for the 2014-2020 horizon [1], which all relate to the integration of autonomous agents in the different urban sectors (e.g., Healthcare, Transport, Manufacturing, Commercial). This strategy also aligns with the vision of a Smart City, where robots carry out tasks in urban environments, while at the same time also acting as moving sensors, thus aiding the real-time collection of data about the city operations [2]. Differently from static sensors, robots can intervene in their surroundings (e.g., by navigating to specific locations, by grasping and manipulating objects, or by dialoguing with users).…”

“…The development of service robots [3][4][5], has become a very active area of research, concurrently with the recent evolution of urban spaces to embrace the vision of Smart Cities, integrating different sensors, actuators and knowledge bases for the real-time management of the city operations [1,2]. This scenario calls for effective methods that can allow robots to make sense of fast-changing environments, presenting unpredictable combinations of known and novel objects.…”

Urban Artificial Intelligence: From Automation to Autonomy in the Smart City

“…It can also be a nanobot almost invisible to the naked eye or an android almost indistinguishable from a person. Robots can be found in retail, customer service, hospitality, education, security and in the maintenance of urban infrastructure (Tiddi et al, 2019;Macrorie et al, 2020). Like autonomous cars, robots are equipped with sensors which make them capable of perceiving the built environment and acquiring information about what is around them.…”

Urban robotic experimentation: San Francisco, Tokyo and Dubai

“…There are considerable challenges in rolling out new forms of RAS in cities. A key issue is that urban robotics is as yet largely untested in the dynamic sphere of urban interaction (Tiddi et al, 2019). Robots have historically been constituted inside controlled spaces of laboratories and factories, largely separated from human bodies and operating at a distance with limited autonomy.…”

“…There is growing interest amongst researchers, technologists and policy-makers in the reimagining and remaking of urban infrastructure and urban social life through advances in robotics and autonomous systems (Del Casino, 2016; Macrorie et al, 2019; Marvin et al, 2018b; Nagenborg, 2018; Royakkers and Van Est, 2015; Tiddi et al, 2019). This is most evident in burgeoning literature on drones, other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and autonomous vehicles (AVs) (Bissell, 2018; Garrett and Anderson, 2017; Shaw, 2016).…”