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…

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…

If robotic companions are to be used in the near future by aging adults, they have to be accepted by them. In the process of developing a methodology to measure, predict and explain acceptance of robotic companions, we researched the…

In Fall 2007, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held the Urban Challenge, a street race between fully autonomous vehicles. Unlike previous challenges, the Urban Challenge vehicles had to follow the California laws for driving, including properly handling…

There is considerable interest in real-world formation-maintenance tasks, where robots move together while maintaining a geometric shape. This interest is motivated by promise of robustly and efficiently moving multiple robots along a path, guided by a human operator. This paper…

A Discrete Event System (DES) is a discrete state space dynamic system that evolves in accordance with the instantaneous occurrence, at possibly unkown times, of physical events. Given a DES, its behavior (the sequence of displayed events) may not satisfy…

In this paper we present our software framework for robotic applications, jde-neoc. This is the second implementation of our cognitive behavior-based architecture JDE, and it is aimed to overcome some of the limitations observed in three years using the first…

In this work we present a reactive autonomous robot navigation system based only on omnidirectional vision. It does not rely on any prior knowledge about the environment apart from assuming a structured one, like indoor corridors or outdoor avenues. The…

The research presented in this paper approaches the issue of indoor localization using the fuzzy logic framework for modeling and dealing with the uncertainty of the position measurements. Fuzzy logic presents properties that make it suitable tool to represent and…