Albert Figueras

RoGi Team Description

This paper describes the main features of the new Rogi Team and some research applied, focused on dynamics of physical agents. It explains the vision system, the control system and the robots, so that the research on dynamical physical agents could be performed. It presents part of the research done in physical agents, especially consensus of properly physical decisions among physical agents, and an example applied to passing.

Outline of Modification Systems

This paper tries to understand the keys necessary for a new approach for automatic control. It starts by analyzing its history and identifying the symptoms that occur once and again when new paradigms, theories or breakthrough inventions came up. Then, it analyses the symptoms of today and discusses whether they match any of the previous symptoms in the past. Then, yet another theory is proposed here, the modification systems, which joins the benefits of Automatic Control and Agents Metaphor: The modification systems, which are designed as a generalization of control systems and situated agents, where anybody does not control a system but modifies a system by some multidimensional change of its original behavior toward a desired target behavior. We show some examples and case studies of their behavior, which as a potential generalization of automatic control give the background to conceive further tools to design more simple but powerful controllers.

SUPERVISION OF HETEROGENEOUS CONTROLLERS FOR A MOBILE ROBOT

Abstract Operating in dynamic environments requires the use of multi-objective (optimization) controllers. This work presents a methodology for supervising a set of controllers designed according to a set of different specifications, in a hierarchical control structure. In this paper, unlike the theory of switching control, a similar structure which focus on choosing the best controller at a given moment is proposed. This methodology is applied to an autonomous mobile robot that follows constrained trajectories. Due to the complex non-linear behavior of the robot, all possible controllers had to be modeled off-line. Then, the on-line supervisor selects an optimal controller to perform the requested task. This method is demonstrated on the soccer robots of RoGiTeam in RoboCup annual competition.

Preliminary Studies of Dynamics of Physical Agent Ecosystems

This paper is a step forward from the agent ecosystems that Hogg studied [6]. We plan to extend these agents ecosystems to physical agents that interact with the physical world. The aim is to conceive algorithms for the choice of resources and to expand this work. Dynamics of choice in such ecosystems depends on pay-off functions that contain information about the real physical world. One contribution here is to formalise the choice of knowledge resources by including a consensus technique. The second contribution is to include diversity by means of physical agents and to analyse the emergent impact in terms of diversity and performance. Simulated soccer robots exemplifies all this.

Fleet size of robots for rescue missions

How to solve the problem of exploration and map updating in disaster areas for survivors and rescue missions is a big challenge for research groups involved in this line. A nonlinear polynomial is described to determine the optimal fleet size of robots using the spatial characteristics of the building to explore. This spatial characteristics are extracted using Voronoi and Skeleton diagrams. The results obtained with this non-linear polynomial are tested simulating the behaviour of a robots team in different maps.

Rogi Team Real: Dynamical Physical Agents

Research in dynamical physical agents, consensus of proper physical decisions among physical agents, and an example of passing is shown. The interest is to introduce introspection of the dynamical behavior of each physical body so that every agent has better knowledge. This has to lead to better passes.

On the simplification of an examples-based controller with support vector machines

Examples-based controllers use historical data to evaluate local approximation models. Large data sets make it prohibitively expensive to evaluate the best control action in real time. Support vector machines (SVM) are known for their ability to identify the minimal set of data points needed to reconstruct an optimal decision surface. A successful application is presented: the simplification of a six-dimensional robotic controller. The SVM reduced the size of the data set to 5.3% of its original size while retaining 99.7% classification accuracy, thus leading the way to online implementation. The results indicate that SVM may be highly effective for the simplification of examples-based controllers.

Supervision of Robot Control

This work shows how to supervise a set of controllers designed by different specification to be applied at requested constrained trajectory for the autonomous mobile robot. In this paper are explained part of the control structure from local controllers to the agent level, the communication between the high supervisor and the local controller are detailed. Several controllers are designed in order to minimize different cost functions. Non-linear behavior of the robot force to work off-line to model all possible controllers, the on-line process concludes the optimal controller to realize a requested task. This work is applied over the soccer robots in the RogiTeam [1].

Rogi 2 Team Description

This paper describes the main features of the new Rogi Team and some research applied focused on dynamics of physical agents. It explains the vision system, the control system and the robots, so that the research on dynamical physical agents could be performed. It presents part of the research done in physical agents, especially consensus of properly physical decisions among physical agents, and an example applied to passing.

Interval PI Velocity Control of a Non-Holonomic Mobile Robot

Abstract Feedforward and feedback control laws based on dynamic models are widely used to enhance the dynamic performance of many dynamical systems like industrial and mobile robots. The main problem of model-based control schemes is that it is assumed that the model is accurate, but the estimation of dynamical parameters as static or dynamic friction are difficult. A new control scheme based on interval models is to be proposed in this paper. The new control law is and interval function which is obtained and computed using interval analysis. The design and implementation an interval model based PI controller is presented through the example of a non-holonomic mobile robot.