Research Topics

Institutional Robotics

Institutional Robotics Institutional Robotics is a new strategy to conceptualize multi-robot systems, which takes institutions as the main tool of social life of robots with bounded rationality and bounded autonomy. This institutional approach intends to get inspiration from philosophical and social sciences research on social and collective phenomena, and is mainly inspired by concepts from…

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Field Robotics

Field Robotics ISLab has been developing, together with the Mobile Robotics Lab, and under the Theme B of ISR - Associate Lab, field robotics activities and applications, motivated by their novel scientific and technical challenges (such as the cooperation among land and aerial robots, and among robots and humans, in unstructured, frequently outdoors, scenarios), relevance…

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Formation State Estimation and Control

Formation State Estimation and Control Multi-robot formation feasibility, formation control and formation state estimation have been subject of research at the ISLab since 2000. Formation State EstimationObstacle Compliant Formation ControlFormation FeasibilityFormation State Estimation An integrated approach to Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) of formation flying spacecraft was developed under the project. The design process considers…

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Discrete Event Systems Based Robotic Task Modeling

Discrete Event Systems Based Robotic Task Modeling Most of the existing robotic task models are not based on formal approaches, are concerned only with a small number of behaviors and are typically tailored to the task at hand. We have proposed, back to 1998 [1] a systems-theory-based task modeling approach for general robotic tasks which…

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Planning under Uncertainty

For single agents, such planning problems are naturally framed in the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) paradigm. In a POMDP, uncertainty in acting and sensing is captured in probabilistic models, and allows an agent to plan on its belief state, which summarizes all the information the agent has received regarding its environment. For the…

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Research, Youngster Activities

Cooperative Active Perception

Cooperative Active Perception One of the recent research topics at the Intelligent Systems Lab is cooperative active perception. In our context, cooperative perception refers to the fusion of sensory information between fixed surveillance cameras and robots, with as goal maximizing the amount and quality of perceptual information available to the system. This information can be…

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Cognitive Architectures

Cognitive Architectures In the engineering of machine intelligence one cannot disregard natural inteligence that humans, together with other animals, display. Intelligence is here understood in the broad sense of behaving appropriately situated in an environment, as in the case of a fight-or-flight response for securing survival, as well as in the case of a mathematician…

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Energy Management in Building Spaces

CtxtBasedMod In previous research, where we proposed using a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to optimized the operation of the Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. Context-based models where the result of our struggle to find suitable representations for the environment while organizing ideas that were being proposed in different research fields (hybrid systems, lumped…

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Space Robotics

Space Robotics: Space is challenging environment, not only in what concerns the potential of orbital applications, but also from an exploration point of view. It is also an inhospitable environment for human presence, thus making a particularly interesting domain for robotic presence. Space Robotics activities encompasses two tracks: the orbital track, targeting robot vehicles in…

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Multimodal interfaces for robot teleoperation

Multimodal interfaces for robot teleoperation: This research topic is focused on the design of novel multimodal robot teleoperation interfaces. While teleoperating a robot sharing the same physical area than the operator is typically straightforward, since the operator can follow the situation with his/her own eyes, when the teleoperation is remote, such as in the case…

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