The effects of available complexity in verbal commands on robot imitation task performance and user satisfaction

Programming robots with verbal commands is limited by the capabilities of the utilized natural language parser. A simple natural language parser which can understand only keywords and small phrases may be easy to use, but limited in what it can interpret and convey. Alternatively, a natural language parser which understands more complex commands...

Scene Classification for a Mobile Interactive Robot

The use of social robots increased in the past few years. Current technology, however, lacks in deploying a single robot for different applications without the help of a human being. Current solutions are time-consuming, labour intensive and hard to generalize. Being aware of its surroundings, in terms of environment and context, the robot can...

The effect of sampling methods on Deep Q-Networks in robot navigation tasks

Enabling mobile robots to autonomously navigate complex environments is essential for real-world deployment in commercial, industrial, military, health care, and domestic settings. Prior methods approach this problem by having the robot maintain an internal map of the world and then use a localization and planning method to navigate through the...

Robot Block-Based Programming: Teaching children how to program an interactive robot using block-based programming language

Robots play an increasingly large role in society and some material already exists that allows children to program robots in elementary school. However, this material often neglects the interactive capabilities of modern robots. The aim of this project is to teach children how to write interactive programs for a robot. For this purpose, a NAO...

Drone-based Data Collection, Analysis & Visualisation for Greenhouse Growth Analysis

Currently, the mapping of a greenhouse is done by hand, rendering it cost and time intensive. A drone could optimise this process by autonomously mapping the greenhouse. Moreover, data such as imaging, humidity and temperature could be collected by the drone whilst navigating in a greenhouse. This data proves to be insightful for the...

Validating Affective Agent Ecosystems

Non-player characters, or agents, in video games have not advanced at the same pace as computer graphics. Newer games have become more aesthetically pleasing and game worlds have grown in size and detail, but the agents living in them are often perceived as stupid and predictable by players. Enriching these agents with emotional capabilities is...

The Affective Storyteller: How Emotion Influences Narrative Generation

In this research it is investigated how character emotions can be used to aid the narrative generation process. To this end the Affective Storyteller is developed, a narrative generation framework where character emotions are closely interconnected with the narrative generation process. For story generation in the Affective Storyteller, it is...

Virtual humans in games: Realistic behavior and emotions for non-player characters

In this project we have set out to promote behavioral-realism in non-player characters (NPCs) on an emotional level. We do this as a step towards a tool that will allow developers to build ?exible and scalable emotional behavior for NPCs and that could be used either in game-development applications or scienti?c psychological studies. In order...

Modular software architecture for cognitive robots performing manipulation tasks

In the near future a large increase in elderly population is expected. One of the solutions to this problem is to introduce service robots which can provide a day to day care, allowing elderly to live longer independently. However performing basic household tasks proposes many challenges as the robot will have to act in a dynamic environment and...

Efficient Person Tracking based on Depth data

This paper introduces an alternative approach to following persons for robotic systems in a domestic environment; Flood Fill on Depth (FFOD) data. Other related work is shown: tracking using a Lucas Kanade tracker, tracking using OpenTLD (Tracking, Learning, Detecting) and tracking using a state of the art particle filter. These algorithms are...