Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups

Starting from human ?sense of touch,? this paper reviews the state of tactile sensing in robotics. The physiology, coding, and transferring tactile data and perceptual importance of the ?sense of touch? in humans are discussed. Following this, a number of design hints derived for robotic tactile sensing are presented. Various technologies and transduction methods used to improve the touch sense capability of robots are presented. Tactile sensing, focused to fingertips and hands until past decade or so, has now been extended to whole body, even though many issues remain open. Trend and methods to develop tactile sensing arrays for various body sites are presented. Finally, various system issues that keep tactile sensing away from widespread utility are discussed.

Tactile Sensing—From Humans to Humanoids

Swarm robotics is an approach to collective robotics that takes inspiration from the self-organized behaviors of social animals. Through simple rules and local interactions, swarm robotics aims at designing robust, scalable, and flexible collective behaviors for the coordination of large numbers of robots. In this paper, we analyze the literature from the point of view of swarm engineering: we focus mainly on ideas and concepts that contribute to the advancement of swarm robotics as an engineering field and that could be relevant to tackle real-world applications. Swarm engineering is an emerging discipline that aims at defining systematic and well founded procedures for modeling, designing, realizing, verifying, validating, operating, and maintaining a swarm robotics system. We propose two taxonomies: in the first taxonomy, we classify works that deal with design and analysis methods; in the second taxonomy, we classify works according to the collective behavior studied. We conclude with a discussion of the current limits of swarm robotics as an engineering discipline and with suggestions for future research directions.

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Swarm robotics: a review from the swarm engineering perspective

In his introduction to this detailed survey of knowledge of insect societies, the author points out that research on insect sociology has proceeded in three phases, the natural history phase, the physiological phase and the population-biology phase. Advances in the first two phases have permitted embarkation in the third phase on a more rigorous theory of social evolution based on population genetics and writing this book, the author wished to relate the three phases of research on insects and to express insect sociology as population biology. A glossary of terms, a considerable bibliography and a general index are included. Other CABI sites 

The Insect Societies

This article describes a novel method of achieving load balancing in telecommunications networks. A simulated network models a typical distribution of calls between nodes; nodes carrying an excess ...

Ant-based load balancing in telecommunications networks

Robotic odor localization has become a prominent research area in recent years. It promises many valuable practical applications, and contributes to the knowledge of biological odor localization, which has in many cases been the source of inspiration. There have been a diversity of approaches, implemented in both simulated and practical experiments, with a wide variety of platforms, and in a number of environments. This article presents a survey of the existing methods, which have been organized into taxonomic classifications. This provides a framework in which to evaluate the methods, view how they relate to each other, and make qualitative comparisons. The methods are grouped at the highest level by environmental conditions, and then by the localization method which in most cases is closely associated with the type of sensors used.

Robot Odor Localization: A Taxonomy and Survey

A comparison of reactive robot chemotaxis algorithms

Human touch sensing sensors and transducers kinesthetic senses for robots touch sensor arrays compliant tactile sensors additional modes of tactile sensing tactile sensing and mobility tactile feedback at the reflex level pattern recognition of tactile data active touch sensing combining sensory data from multiple sources.

Robot tactile sensing

From the Publisher:
Insects are extremely successful creatures, thriving in our ever-changing and unpredictable world. One of the factors behind their success is the use of odour to increase their efficiency when searching for food, to help navigate between a source of food and their nest and to enable them to find a mate. Mobile robots would have their capabilities greatly enhanced if they could make use of similar techniques. This important book describes current research aimed at giving robots the ability to generate, detect and discriminate between odours, together with the control algorithms using such sensory information.

Odour Detection by Mobile Robots

Nest construction is an impressive achievement for social insects. They employ templates (or pat terns) in the environment to guide construction tasks and robot swarms can use similar mechanisms. Early work examined how a spatio-temporal varying template can be utilized by a swarm of minimalist robots to build the framework for a linear wall. From this, it became clear that a method for regulating construction in a variable environment was needed. To this end, a social insect inspired distributed feedback mechanism is proposed and verified. Direct and indirect transfer of information between individuals, through the use of signals and cues, is shown to facilitate closure of a feedback loop allowing the system to operate close to optimally. Perturbation experiments demonstrate the robotic swarm's ability to adapt to environmental changes. The work described in this paper provides the basis for a distributed robotic system capable of constructing any given planar structure--a goal implicit in many of the suggested applications for collective construction.

R. Andrew Russell

Papers

Robot Odor Localization: A Taxonomy and Survey

A comparison of reactive robot chemotaxis algorithms

Robot tactile sensing

Odour Detection by Mobile Robots

A Distributed Feedback Mechanism to Regulate Wall Construction by a Robotic Swarm