This paper describes the design of an autonomous blimp-based robot and its navigation system. The robot was based on a commercial kit and its dimensions were suitable for use in indoor environments. Our main goal was to develop a simple…

Nowadays robots are being created that interact with human beings in order to satisfy certain social needs. Following this trend, the development of the social robot Probo has started. The robot will be used in hospitals, as a tele-interface for…

Recent multi-robot exploration algorithms usually rely on occupancy grids as their core world representation. However, those grids are not appropriate for environments that are very large or whose boundaries are not well delimited from the beginning of the exploration. In…

The growing demand for service robots requires a better and more natural human-machine interaction. Given that an important part of human communication is non-verbal, it is necessary to endow robots with gestural communication capabilities similar to humans. This paper describes…