For a mobile robot that interacts with humans such as a home assistant or a tour guide robot, activities such as locating objects, following specific people, and distinguishing among different people are fundamental, yet challenging robotic vision tasks. For complex…

Can you imagine a useful task you would like a social robot to perform for you? This paper presents an Internet survey where participants were asked this question to identify applications for social robots. The applications mentioned by the participants…

In this paper, we propose an original method to geoposition an audio/video stream with multiple emitters that are at the same time receivers of the mixed signal. The obtained method is suitable when a list of positions within a known…

To provide more efficient and flexible alternatives for the applications of secret sharing schemes, this paper describes a threshold sharing scheme based on exponentiation of matrices in Galois fields. A significant characteristic of the proposed scheme is that each participant…

Open societies are situated in dynamic environments and are formed by heterogeneous autonomous agents. In order to ensure social order, norms have been employed as coordination mechanisms. However, the dynamical features of open systems may cause that norms loose their…

This paper presents a multiagent recommendation system (RecMAS) able to coordinate the interactions between a user agent (AgUser) and a set of commercial agents (AgComs). It provides a useful service for monitoring changes in the AgUser’s beliefs and decisions based…

Autonomous navigation is one of the most essential capabilities of autonomous robots. In order to navigate autonomously, robots need to detect obstacles. While many approaches achieve good results tackling this problem with lidar sensor devices, vision based approaches are cheaper…

This special issue of the Journal of Physical Agents is devoted to multi-robot systems. Some might perhaps argue that the term should have been ”multi-agent systems” or ”physical multi-agent systems”, in accordance with the title of the journal. In any…

This special issue of the Journal of Physical Agents is devoted to human interaction with domestic robots. The form, features and future, of domestic robotic devices, from entertainment-based agents through to robotic cleaners, companions, assistants and helpers, are considered and…

The Workshop of Physical Agents intends to be a forum for information and experience exchange in different areas regarding the concept of agent in physical environments, especially applied to the control and coordination of autonomous systems: robots, mobile robots, industrial…