Services and technologies are in evolution in order to develop a new generation of robotic systems that might operate in dynamic real-world environments. In this paper, we focus on the ability of robot to understand and to surpass the blocked situations autonomously without operator intervention. Such situations may occur when the robot cannot succeed the current action and cannot move to the next one. We remark that in the literature, the operator has a crucial role consisting in providing all information about the environment and in making interpretations. In this paper, we propose an RSAW (Robot Situation AWareness) system, developed in order to help a robot to surpass a blocked situation and accomplish its goal whilst minimizing the operator intervention. RSAW is a new general system aiming to increase the autonomy of the robot; It is inspired by the notion of Situation Awareness (SA). In fact, RSAW defines a knowledge representation using ontologies and a process in order to surpass a blocked situation. RSAW is designed according to the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) methodology. This choice is done to preserve the generality of our system. This paper focalizes on the process of the RSAW system and the interaction between the process and the knowledge representation. The experimentations conducted in real environment with the Smart Autonomous Majordomo (SAM) robot, have shown the robustness and the efficiency of the proposed system.

The sector of robotics develops rapidly at the moment. Law is not already prepared for the aspects coming with this new technology. This regards not only to research and development but also to application and use of this systems. Some legal areas like liability or admission are already debated at the moment. In this paper other crucial problems like privacy or legal status will be discussed. Issues of privacy regarding legal sources, basic principles and privacy in research and development will be focused on. Moreover, the use and application of robots will be analyzed. Additionally it concentrates on the status of robots and electronic personhood. Actions of software agents will be evaluated legally and the concept of electronic personhood will be introduced.

Robotics is now having an exponential growth and the achievement of the singularity (the point where the artificial systems' capabilities will reach and exceed humans' ones) in the course of a few decades is expected to be on the forefront. From a legal point of view several questions arise, such as (among others) the market standards to apply to such entities, the range of safety requirements that should be ensured, the type of regulation in terms of liability and the level of subjectivity that can be recognized. This paper aims to offer a general framework to explore existing laws, from a European perspective, and check them out to verify if these rules are able to face some critical aspects involving robots, such as consumer market and civil liability.

In this paper, we present a mobile robot with an arm and a gripper, which can generate its own scenarios before executing them. Hand-written scenarios, as we previously did, are not applicable any longer, since a wider range of scenarios is aimed at, which cannot be predicted in advance. Our approach involves task planning, for scenario generation, and finite state automation, for scenario execution. Our robot is used for servicing handicapped or ageing persons in their apartment.

This paper deals with the design of a robotic platform providing a grasping procedure to assist disabled persons. Like most of the vision-based systems, the camera used to guide the arm toward the object is embedded onto the gripper, which gives a very local view of the environment. We propose to use a catadioptric sensor in order to deal with situations where the object of interest is out of the embedded camera field of view. The mirror used has been especially designed for our robot, satisfying several constraints of the final application. The solution proposed respects one of the main matters of all systems designed for disabled persons, reduce the user strain. A single click is necessary to position the robotic arm toward the direction of the object. Clinical evaluations realized during one month in four medical centers with about 40 users confirm the validity of our system.

This paper presents a method to determine the rough shape of an object. This is a step in the development of a ldquoone click grasping toolrdquo, a grasping tool of everyday-life objects for an assistant robot dedicated to elderly or disabled. The goal is to determine the quadric that approximates at best the shape of an unknown object using multi-view measurements. Non-linear optimization techniques are considered to achieve this goal. Since multiple views are necessary, an active vision process is considered in order to minimize the uncertainty on the estimated parameters and determine the next best view. Finally, results that show the validity of the approach are presented.

This article presents a service robotic system for disabled people. SAM is a mobile platform that grasps any textured object in an apartment-like environment. The object grasping is realized with a robotic arm, mounted onto the mobile unit. Thanks to the stereo rig on the armpsilas gripper, the user defines the object to grasp on a remote screen, in a very simple way, and the grasping is autonomously performed by visual servoing. The scheduling of the operations is defined and controlled with automatons that are dynamically interpreted with a scenario manager. At last, the communication between the different components is realized with web services through a DPWS layer, providing an efficient solution for sharing data between any device of an intelligent home. Experiments confirm the validity of our approach.

A critical assumption of many multi-view control systems is the initial visibility of the regions of interest from all the views. An initialization step is proposed for a hybrid eye-in-hand/eye-to-hand grasping system to fulfil this requirement. In this paper, the object of interest is assumed to be within the eye-to-hand field of view, whereas it may not be within the eye-in-hand one. The object model is unknown and no database is used. The object lies in a complex scene with a cluttered background. A method to automatically focus on the object of interest is presented, tested and validated on a multi view robotic system.

Pose estimation has many applications in robotics, such as robot localization using a vision sensor, or position-based visual servoing. In this paper, a simple but an efficient pose estimation method from minimal point pairs is given. The method we propose is based on exhaustive optimization of only two most critical parameters. It allows to solve the local minima problem. The both model based and free model pose estimation are treated. Finally, simulation results are given to validate the proposed method