Construction robotics

First construction robots had been designed in the beginning seventies in order to increase the quality in prefabrication of modular homes in Japan and the late 70ies planning started for use of robots in construction sites. In the 80ies the first construction robots appeared on sites and in the 90ies integrated automated building construction sites had been developped and implemented about 20 times. Furthermore maintenance robots for cleaning and inspection of buildings, infrastructure and real estate and safety robots guarding buildings had been developped. In the first decade of this century humanoid construction robots had been tested. In the future service robots will be a big market in the built envrironment.     

Enabling technologies for e-business

While distributed object concepts can be difficult to grasp at first, applying them to build reusable components eventually leads to faster time to market. And now a host of enabling technologies is available, making it easier to use distributed objects for Web based e-business projects. These enabling technologies provide the technical underpinnings for Web-enabled object architectures. Web-enabled object architectures integrate the power of objects with the Web's distribution capabilities. But we need special tools to help minimize the complexities of using distributed object technologies. The advent of application servers and the benefits of distributed object technologies remove the bounds that previously restricted the Web. Companies can use these new technologies to embrace an expanded scope of business that will in turn continue to generate further requirements for new technology     

Core capabilities for practitioners in achieving e-business innovation

The rapid advance of information technology and its penetration into the core elements of the business model and organizational structures is enabling profound and significant organizational changes. In such a dynamic environment, firms must be able to continually evolve their capabilities to facilitate electronic business (e-business) innovation. Yet, current research pays little attention to the core capabilities that contribute to e-business innovation in general. This research seeks to identify the core capabilities that are necessary for achieving e-business innovation. We propose a tri-core model of e-business innovation adopted from Swanson (1994), which knits together three cores: business technology, the business model and the value network. We use this model initially to specify the functional areas of the capabilities. Based on data collected through an intensive literature review and an exploratory Delphi study, thirteen essential capabilities were considered as the keys to e-business innovation exploitation and exploration. Firms can facilitate their e-business solutions over time through the successful development of these capabilities. These findings provide great insights for practitioners and scholars alike to better understand the core capabilities for achieving e-business innovation. It can also help practitioners form a template of the requisite in-house management for identifying knowledge gaps and developing action plans.     

Using situation calculus for e-business agents

As the Internet grows, it is becoming less feasible for customers and merchants to manually visit each web site, analyze the information there, and make sound business decisions regarding the trading of goods or services. To cope with this evolution, software agents can be designed that are capable of automating the more routine, tedious, and time-consuming tasks involved in current trading processes. At a higher level agents may also be able to negotiate and make autonomous decisions and commitments on behalf of their owners.

This paper describes an agent implementation using the situation calculus, which offers a possibly unifying paradigm for dynamic agents. Interesting applications are currently being developed. Our contribution is a situation calculus agent system developed for e-business. Ongoing work is focused on implementing this system in an open marketplace environment.     

Aspects of non-cartesian robotics

Non-Cartesian robotics, which began with the introduction of subsumption architecture by Rodney Brooks, now encompasses a wide range of robotics that do not follow traditional cartesian principles in the running of a robot. The new field is sometimes called biorobotics as it draws its guiding principles from biology, physiology, behavioural sciences, genetics and theories of evolution, brain sciences, genetics and theories of evolution, brain sciences, ethology, psychology, and other related non-engineering disciplines. The difference in principles of operation, however, has roots deeper in the philosophical underpinnings of the way we view controlling artifacts and the concept of control itself when it is contrasted against the concept of autonomy. Realization of increasingly higher levels of autonomy is routinely demanded today not only in industry where most robotic applications occur, but also in areas closer to our daily life where a gradual but steady increase in service applications of robotics is observed. This paper introduces the concept of non-Cartesian robotics as an antithesis to conventional (Cartesian) robotics and describes various aspects of this new way of running a robotic system. This work was presented, in part, at the International symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, February 18–20, 1996     

A taxonomy for multi-agent robotics

A key difficulty in the design of multi-agent robotic systems is the size and complexity of the space of possible designs. In order to make principled design decisions, an understanding of the many possible system configurations is essential. To this end, we present a taxonomy that classifies multi-agent systems according to communication, computational and other capabilities. We survey existing efforts involving multi-agent systems according to their positions in the taxonomy. We also present additional results concerning multi-agent systems, with the dual purposes of illustrating the usefulness of the taxonomy in simplifying discourse about robot collective properties, and also demonstrating that a collective can be demonstrably more powerful than a single unit of the collective.The support of NSERC Canada is greatfully acknowledged.     

Managing cooperation in e-business systems

E-Business management involves monitoring and controlling all forms of business transactions conducted over the Internet, extranets, and related communications technologies and services. As such, it includes the management of networks, systems, and software applications. E-Business management is beginning to depend increasingly on knowledge of the cooperative aspects of partners in a business chain and the cooperative aspects of stake-holders in e-business operations. The study of cooperation offers many opportunities to apply social network analyses to derive software solutions for the management of e-business. This article provides a methodology and case study that recognises the dimension of cooperation among a multiplicity of organisations, coined “Awareness-based Cooperative Management.” It is aimed towards the design or re-engineering of effective e-business management systems, where the key concept involves the degree of awareness held by e-business stake-holders. Awareness is defined in terms of stake-holder interactions and artefacts used in those interactions such as buyer specifications, requests for proposals, offers, service level agreements, and the like. Since awareness is an indispensable, albeit an inherently vague concept, we cast it and reason about it with the apparatus of fuzzy logic.

Pulse-signaling algorithm: a non-device-based robotics control and communication

A pulse-signaling algorithm (PSA) is proposed for robotics control and communication. Using the PSA, an operator can send control signals directly to control a robot or a group of robots. No extra equipment is needed in PSA because the pulse signal can be generated easily from the operator. Three aspects of the algorithm are considered in this paper: communication protocol, hardware prototype and software implementation. The PSA protocol is composed of three parts, i.e. command code, operand code and address code, in order to control the desired robot to do the desired work. A PSA prototype circuit is designed and developed, and PSA software is programmed on the designed prototype circuit to realize the algorithm. Some experiments are performed to test and evaluate the proposed algorithm.     

Neural networks in robotics: A survey

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the research being done in neural network approaches to robotics, outline the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches, and predict future trends in this area.This work was supported, in part, by Sandia National Laboratories under contract No. 06-1977, Albuquerque, New Mexico.     

Compound behaviors in pheromone robotics

We are pursuing techniques for coordinating the actions of large numbers of small-scale robots to achieve useful large-scale results in surveillance, reconnaissance, hazard detection, and path finding. Using the biologically inspired notion of “virtual pheromone” messaging, we describe how many coordinated activities can be accomplished without centralized control. By virtue of this simple messaging scheme, a robot swarm can become a distributed computing mesh embedded within the environment, while simultaneously acting as a physical embodiment of the user interface. We further describe a set of logical primitives for controlling the flow of virtual pheromone messages throughout the robot swarm. These enable the design of complex group behaviors mediated by messages exchanged between neighboring robots.     

Open-hardware e-puck Linux extension board for experimental swarm robotics research

In this paper we describe the implementation of a Linux extension board for the e-puck educational mobile robot, designed to enhance the computation, memory and networking performance of the robot at very low cost. The extension board is based on a 32-bit ARM9 microprocessor and provides wireless network support. The ARM9 extension board runs in parallel with the dsPIC microprocessor on the e-puck motherboard with communication between the two via an SPI bus. The extension board is designed to handle computationally intensive image processing, wireless communication and high-level intelligent robot control algorithms, while the dsPIC handles low-level sensor interfacing, data processing and motor control. The extension board runs an embedded Linux operating system, along with a Debian-based port of the root file system stored in a Micro SD card. The extended e-puck robot platform requires minimal effort to integrate the well-known open-source robot control framework Player and, when placed within a TCP/IP networked infrastructure, provides a powerful and flexible platform for experimental swarm robotics research.     

An empirical investigation of competency factors affecting e-business success in European SMEs

In the last decade there was growing interest in strategic management literature about factors that influence a company's ability to use IT. There is general consensus that knowledge and competency are necessary in developing an IT capability, but there is very little understanding of what the necessary competencies are, and how they influence IS usage in different contexts. The small and medium-sized enterprise context is particularly interesting for two reasons: it constitutes a major part of the economy and it has been relatively unsuccessful in exploiting e-business.     

发育机器人研究综述

发育机器人是国际上近年兴起的一个研究热点，但在国内相关研究工作尚未全面起步．较为全面地介绍了发育机器人的基本概念、核心思想和发展历程，重点剖析了几种典型的发育模型和学习方法，针对该领域目前存在的学术争论，如组成结构，研究目的和性能评价等，做了详细的探讨．本文最后从理论研究和应用两方面展望了发育机器人的发展趋势，并指出了需要进一步研究解决的问题。     

云机器人的研究进展

将云机器人作为传统分布式网络机器人的自然衍生和发展,并从这一视角分析了云机器人与其他机器人之间的联系与区别.进一步地,详细介绍和分析了云机器人的技术基础,对国内外基于云的机器人服务平台和云机器人相关研究项目与应用进行了综述;在此基础上,分析了一种较为通用的云机器人系统框架模型.最后归纳总结了云机器人亟待解决的关键技术,并对未来云机器人的发展趋势进行了展望.     

Evolutionary learning of a fuzzy controller for wall-following behavior in mobile robotics

The design of fuzzy controllers for the implementation of behaviors in mobile robotics is a complex and highly time-consuming task. The use of machine learning techniques such as evolutionary algorithms or artificial neural networks for the learning of these controllers allows to automate the design process. In this paper, the automated design of a fuzzy controller using genetic algorithms for the implementation of the wall-following behavior in a mobile robot is described. The algorithm is based on the iterative rule learning approach, and is characterized by three main points. First, learning has no restrictions neither in the number of membership functions, nor in their values. In the second place, the training set is composed of a set of examples uniformly distributed along the universe of discourse of the variables. This warrantees that the quality of the learned behavior does not depend on the environment, and also that the robot will be capable to face different situations. Finally, the trade off between the number of rules and the quality/accuracy of the controller can be adjusted selecting the value of a parameter. Once the knowledge base has been learned, a process for its reduction and tuning is applied, increasing the cooperation between rules and reducing its number.     

Measuring e-business dependability: The employee perspective

Electronic business (e-business) enables employees in organizations to complete jobs more efficiently if they can rely on the dependable functions and services delivered by e-business. Unfortunately, only a limited amount of research has explored the topic of employee perceived dependability of e-business, and the concept lacks measurement tools. Hence, this research develops a validated instrument for measuring e-business dependability (EBD) from an employee perspective. Based on a survey of 152 employees in six large semiconductor manufacturing companies in the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park in Taiwan, this research conceptualizes and operationalizes the construct of EBD, and then creates and refines an e-business dependability instrument (EBDI). After rigorous purification procedures, the 22-item EBD instrument with good reliability and validity is presented. Finally, this paper concludes with a discussion of potential applications of this EBD instrument. The e-business dependability instrument and its potential implications will not only aid researchers interested in designing and testing related e-business theories, but also provide direction for managers in improving the quality and performance of e-business.     

A framework for performance measurement in the e-business environment

The advent of networked economy calls for new understanding of business, and it is evidenced by the visible trend of traditional businesses either migrating to e-business or expanding to embrace electronic commerce. Constant change in the environment means continually evolving strategies, new products, new processes and new technologies to adopt. E-business metrics are needed to measure performance with the firm’s strategic focus in mind, and they must go beyond the Web metrics that are discussed in the usual electronic commerce context. The basic objective of this paper is to present a framework for developing performance measurement metrics in the e-business environment. The proposed framework, designed by incorporating the balanced scorecard methodology with existing taxonomies of e-business models and the theories behind them, is intended to enable firms to develop new metrics that are needed to implement e-business strategies and tactics.     

Artificial life and embodied robotics: current issues and future challenges

In this article we explore some of the issues currently facing researchers in the interface between the twin fields of Artificial Life and Robotics, and the challenges and potential synergy of these two areas in the creation of future robotic life forms. There are three strands of research which we feel will be of key importance in the possible development of future embodied artificial life forms. These are the areas of evolutionary robotics and evolutionary humanoid robotics in particular, probabilistic robotics for deliberation, and robot benchmarking with associated metrics and standards. We briefly explore each of these areas in turn, focusing on our current research in each field and what we see as the potential issues and challenges for the future. This work was presented in part at the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 31–February 2, 2008     

Testbeds for ubiquitous robotics: A survey

The growing interest in ubiquitous robotics has originated in the last years the development of a high variety of testbeds. This paper presents a survey on existing ubiquitous robotics testbeds comprising networked mobile robots and networks of distributed sensors, cameras and smartphones, among others. The survey provides an insight into the testbed design, internal behavior and use, identifying trends and existing gaps and proposing guidelines for testbed developers. The level of interoperability among different ubiquitous robotics technologies is used as the main conducting criterion of the survey. Other features analyzed include testbed architectures, target experiments and usability tools.