Dissecting Robotics - historical overview and future perspectives
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paper_title: Optimal control-1950 to 1985

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Optimal control had its origins in the calculus of variations in the 17th century. The calculus of variations was developed further in the 18th century by Euler and Lagrange and in the 19th century by Legendre, Jacobi, Hamilton, and Weierstrass. In the early 20th century, Bolza and Bliss put the final touches of rigor on the subject. In 1957, Bellman gave a new view of Hamilton-Jacobi theory which he called dynamic programming, essentially a nonlinear feedback control scheme. McShane (1939) and Pontryagin (1962) extended the calculus of variations to handle control variable inequality constraints, the latter enunciating his elegant maximum principle. The truly enabling element for use of optimal control theory was the digital computer, which became available commercially in the 1950s. In the 1980s research began, and continues today, on making optimal feedback logic more robust to variations in the plant and disturbance models; one element of this research is worst-case and H-infinity control, which developed out of differential game theory.
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paper_title: Colossus: its origins and originators

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The British Colossus computer was one of the most important tools in the wartime effort to break German codes. Based on interviews and on recently declassified documents, this article clarifies the roles played by Thomas Flowers, Alan Turing, William Tutte, and Max Newman in the events leading to the installation of the first Colossus at Bletchley Park, Britain's wartime code-breaking establishment, in December 1943.
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paper_title: Position Sensing Wrists for Industrial Manipulators.

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Abstract : A new wrist design for an industrial manipulator is described that exhibits a range of compliant control. This is necessary for large industrial robots that experience a range of tool-lengths and pay-loads. The device has five and a half degrees of freedom and is structurally similar to a previous design by McCallion. Reinforced elastomeric spheres are used in the compliant platform of the unit. These display a monotonically increasing spring stiffness and can be adjusted using a pressurized fluid. Deflections in the wrist are measured using LVDT transducers. A dedicated microcomputer monitors the deflections and modifies robot sequences to correct for long-term errors in repetitive tasks. (Author)
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paper_title: An integrated navigation and motion control system for autonomous multisensory mobile robots

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Research on mobile robots began in the late sixties with the Stanford Research Institute’s pioneering work. Two versions of SHAKEY, an autonomous mobile robot, were built in 1968 and 1971. The main purpose of this project was “to study processes for the realtime control of a robot system that interacts with a complex environment” 〈NIL 69〉. Indeed, mobile robots were and still are a very convenient and powerful support for research on artificial intelligence oriented robotics. They possess the capacity to provide a variety of problems at different levels of generality and difficulty in a large domain including perception, decision making, communication, etc., which all have to be considered within the scope of the specific constraints of robotics: on-line computing, cost considerations, operating ability, and reliability.
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paper_title: KUKA Robots On-Site

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Within a relatively short time span, industrial robots have turned from an exclusive tool for high-end industries to a multifunctional machine for a wide range of users, from small and medium enterprises to architectural and industrial design offices. The demands of these users differ significantly of how robots are used in the automotive industry, with robots working on-site and even in the close proximity of human workers. New technological advances are required to cover these needs, from light-weight robots with an array of sensors to mobile platforms that can autonomously move heavy robotic arms with millimeter accuracy.
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paper_title: Robot Programming Languages—A State of the Art Survey

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The brief history of textual robot programming language development through the last two decades is traced. Individual languages are then reviewed with respect to their inherent characteristics such as data types, control structures, use of sensors, interfacing capacity with external machines, etc. Reviewed languages range from WAVE released in the early 1970’s to AML/X developed in 1986.
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paper_title: Understanding the Linux Kernel: From I/O Ports to Process Management

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A solar water heating assembly utilizing a heat collector in a fluid communication and water delivery to and from a primary and/or auxiliary water storage tank. The heat collector unit includes a collector plate mounted within an insulated casing and includes water filled conduit integrally formed thereon and disposed in fluid communication with a primary heater conduit assembly having a plurality of heat collector elements mounted in predetermined relation thereon so as to initiate heating of the water or liquid entering the tubing wherein heat is gathered from the interior of the casing in which the tubing and primary heating unit are both mounted. The primary heater conduit is disposed in insulated relation to the collector unit wherein the collector unit is mounted in spaced relation to the bottom of the casing. A heat sensing element is mounted on the assembly in temperature gauging relation to the water passing therethrough and further being electrically connected to a pump element which forces water circulation between the heat collector unit and the primary and/or auxiliary water storage tank.
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paper_title: On activating human communications with pet-type robot AIBO

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In this paper we describe effects of human interactions with a pet-type robot, especially with AIBO. First, we describe a design concept for AIBO based on how to increase its "lifelike" appearance. By introducing statistical results of marketing, and experiments involving human-robot interactions using AIBO, we show that this pet-type robot activates human emotions effectively. Furthermore, the experiments demonstrate that AIBO helps in human-human communication. We discuss the phenomena of interaction with AIBO, and attempt to explain why this happened.
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paper_title: RobotScript™: the introduction of a universal robot programming language

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The flexibility of a robot system comes from its ability to be programmed. How the robot is programmed is a main concern of all robot users. A good mechanical arm can be underutilized if it is too difficult to program. The introduction of the Universal Robot Controller™ (URC) has made the possibility of a standard, easy to use, robot programming language a reality. The URC is an open‐architecture, PC‐based robot controller. It will work with virtually any robot and gives the user increased flexibility and capabilities over the standard OEM controllers. The URC uses Windows NT as its operating system. The URC is the ideal platform for a universal robot programming language, RobotScript. It allows one robot language to run all robots in a factory.
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paper_title: Current Research and Development and Approach to Future Automated Construction in Japan

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Automated construction technologies have been developed and introduced in the Japanese construction industries since the 1980s. However, the construction industry remains a craftoriented and labor-intensive industry with minimal automation of tasks. Automation of construction processes has potential significant effects on construction of buildings. This paper describes the history of research and development of automation technology in Japan and the advantages to using construction robots and automated building construction system at the field level, and examines possible application and requirements in future construction operations. In addition, current research and development of robotics technology is introduced with concrete examples.
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paper_title: ABB focus on “lean robotization”

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Outlines ABB Robotics new manufacturing philosophy of “lean robotization” based on early partnership between customer and supplier and a detailed knowledge of the customers application requirements. Examines two new ABB robots, suitable for a wide variety of functions, and operated by a new controller which uses a windows‐style user interface to simplify programming and process tuning. Describes some of the new features of the control which are claimed to bring major benefits in productivity and quality.
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paper_title: Experiences with the LEGO Mindstorms throughout the Undergraduate Computer Science Curriculum

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The LEGO Mindstorms Robotics Invention Systems are contemporary learning tools that have been used in a number of courses throughout the undergraduate Computer Science curriculum. However, with a few exceptions, very little information is available describing the degree to which Mindstorms projects improved (or hindered) the learning process in these courses. This paper describes personal experiences and provides practical advice for successfully incorporating Mindstorms projects into an undergraduate computer science course, as well as highlighting the types of assignments that have not worked well. Specifically, the author has incorporated Mindstorms projects into five courses: Fundamental Concepts of Computer Science (a non-major Computer Science course), Programming I, Programming II, a general programming language practicum, and the survey of Programming Languages course. These courses will be summarized, and the paper will conclude with a general discussion of lessons learned about Mindstorms use in the classroom.
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paper_title: Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks

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We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5% and 17.0% which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully-connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overriding in the fully-connected layers we employed a recently-developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% achieved by the second-best entry.
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paper_title: Learning hand-eye coordination for robotic grasping with deep learning and large-scale data collection

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We describe a learning-based approach to hand-eye coordination for robotic grasping from monocular images. To learn hand-eye coordination for grasping, we trained a large convolutional neural network to predict the probability that task-space motion of the gripper will result in successful grasps, using only monocular camera images and independently of camera calibration or the current robot pose. This requires the network to observe the spatial relationship between the gripper and objects in the scene, thus learning hand-eye coordination. We then use this network to servo the gripper in real time to achieve successful grasps. To train our network, we collected over 800,000 grasp attempts over the course of two months, using between 6 and 14 robotic manipulators at any given time, with differences in camera placement and hardware. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method achieves effective real-time control, can successfully grasp novel objects, and corrects mistakes by continuous servoing.
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paper_title: Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks

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Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are powerful models that have achieved excellent performance on difficult learning tasks. Although DNNs work well whenever large labeled training sets are available, they cannot be used to map sequences to sequences. In this paper, we present a general end-to-end approach to sequence learning that makes minimal assumptions on the sequence structure. Our method uses a multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to map the input sequence to a vector of a fixed dimensionality, and then another deep LSTM to decode the target sequence from the vector. Our main result is that on an English to French translation task from the WMT-14 dataset, the translations produced by the LSTM achieve a BLEU score of 34.8 on the entire test set, where the LSTM's BLEU score was penalized on out-of-vocabulary words. Additionally, the LSTM did not have difficulty on long sentences. For comparison, a phrase-based SMT system achieves a BLEU score of 33.3 on the same dataset. When we used the LSTM to rerank the 1000 hypotheses produced by the aforementioned SMT system, its BLEU score increases to 36.5, which is close to the previous state of the art. The LSTM also learned sensible phrase and sentence representations that are sensitive to word order and are relatively invariant to the active and the passive voice. Finally, we found that reversing the order of the words in all source sentences (but not target sentences) improved the LSTM's performance markedly, because doing so introduced many short term dependencies between the source and the target sentence which made the optimization problem easier.
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paper_title: Design and use paradigms for Gazebo, an open-source multi-robot simulator

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Simulators have played a critical role in robotics research as tools for quick and efficient testing of new concepts, strategies, and algorithms. To date, most simulators have been restricted to 2D worlds, and few have matured to the point where they are both highly capable and easily adaptable. Gazebo is designed to fill this niche by creating a 3D dynamic multi-robot environment capable of recreating the complex worlds that would be encountered by the next generation of mobile robots. Its open source status, fine grained control, and high fidelity place Gazebo in a unique position to become more than just a stepping stone between the drawing board and real hardware: data visualization, simulation of remote environments, and even reverse engineering of blackbox systems are all possible applications. Gazebo is developed in cooperation with the Player and Stage projects (Gerkey, B. P., et al., July 2003), (Gerkey, B. P., et al., May 2001), (Vaughan, R. T., et al., Oct. 2003), and is available from http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/gazebo/ gazebo.html.
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paper_title: The player/stage project: Tools for multirobot and distributed sensor systems

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This paper describes the Player/Stage software tools applied to multi-robot, distributed-robot and sensor network systems. Player is a robot device server that provides network transparent robot control. Player seeks to constrain controller design as little as possible; it is device independent, non-locking and language- and style-neutral. Stage is a lightweight, highly configurable robot simulator that supports large populations. Player/Stage is a community Free Software project. Current usage of Player and Stage is reviewed, and some interesting research opportunities opened up by this infrastructure are identified.
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paper_title: Learning hand-eye coordination for robotic grasping with deep learning and large-scale data collection

paper_content:

We describe a learning-based approach to hand-eye coordination for robotic grasping from monocular images. To learn hand-eye coordination for grasping, we trained a large convolutional neural network to predict the probability that task-space motion of the gripper will result in successful grasps, using only monocular camera images and independently of camera calibration or the current robot pose. This requires the network to observe the spatial relationship between the gripper and objects in the scene, thus learning hand-eye coordination. We then use this network to servo the gripper in real time to achieve successful grasps. To train our network, we collected over 800,000 grasp attempts over the course of two months, using between 6 and 14 robotic manipulators at any given time, with differences in camera placement and hardware. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method achieves effective real-time control, can successfully grasp novel objects, and corrects mistakes by continuous servoing.
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Title: Dissecting Robotics - Historical Overview and Future Perspectives

Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: This section provides the etymological origins of the terms "Robot" and "Robotics," the early concepts introduced by Karel Čapek and Isaac Asimov, and an overview of how the field of robotics has evolved from fiction to scientific reality.

Section 2: THE EVOLUTION OF ROBOTICS
Description 2: This section outlines the technological and societal influences on the progress of robotics, dividing its development into four generations from pre-robots to intelligent robots, with detailed characteristics and examples for each generation.

Section 3: ENVISIONING THE FUTURE OF ROBOTICS
Description 3: This section analyzes historical and current trends in the robotics market across industrial, professional, and consumer segments, and lays out the characteristics and expectations for the upcoming generation of collaborative and personal robots.

Section 4: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Description 4: This section discusses the current limitations in robotics due to incompatible systems, the hype cycle of robotics development, the rise of industrial robots, the integration of robots into various disciplines, and the increasing role of Artificial Intelligence, concluding with the implications for future development and societal impacts.