| 1. |
- Hanna, Atieh, et al.
(author)
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Requirements for designing and controlling autonomous collaborative robots system-an industrial case
- 2018
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In: Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering. - : IOS Press BV. ; 8, s. 139-144, s. 139-144
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Automation and Robotics have been described as two of the enabling technologies for the Industry 4.0 paradigm, especially the use of autonomous and collaborative robot systems that can work together with humans and other machines. In manual assembly for example, these so-called co-bot systems (that also includes autonomous transportation and specialized machines) can improve the automation level, product quality, as well as human working conditions. However, in order to fully benefit from co-bot systems, many challenges need to be addressed before it can be introduced in complex industries e.g. the truck industry. This paper presents a number of challenges and requirements identified during an industrial use case, where autonomous co-bot systems have been introduced into an existing manual assembly station. These requirements are related to safe and intuitive interactions, smart tools, the need to manage variability as well as the need for highly flexible communication and control. During the use case, a number of initial solutions was developed where the implemented control architecture was based on the framework Robot Operation System (ROS) and Sequence Planner (SP).
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| 2. |
- Ameri, Afshin, et al.
(author)
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Planning and Supervising Autonomous Underwater Vehicles through the Mission Management Tool
- 2020
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In: Global OCEANS 2020 OCEANS. - 9781728154466
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Complex underwater missions involving heterogeneous groups of AUVs and other types of vehicles require a number of steps from defining and planning the mission, orchestration during the mission execution, recovery of the vehicles, and finally post-mission data analysis. In this work the Mission Management Tool (MMT), a software solution for addressing the above-mentioned services is proposed. As demonstrated in the real-world tests the MMT is able to support the mission operators. The MMT hides the complex system consisting of software solutions, hardware, and vehicles from the user, and allows intuitive interaction with the vehicles involved in a mission. The tool can adapt to a wide spectrum of missions assuming different types of robotic systems and mission objectives.
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| 3. |
- Frasheri, Mirgita, et al.
(author)
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Adaptive Autonomy in Wireless Sensor Networks
- 2020
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In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS. - 9781450375184 ; , s. 375-383
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Moving nodes in a Mobile Wireless Sensor Network (MWSN) typically have two maintenance objectives: (i) extend the coverage of the network as long as possible to a target area, and (ii) extend the longevity of the network as much as possible. As nodes move and also route traffic in the network, their battery levels deplete differently for each node. Dead nodes lead to loss of connectivity and even to disengaging full parts of the network. Several reactive and rule-based approaches have been proposed to solve this issue by adapting redeployment to depleted nodes. However, in large networks a cooperative approach may increase performance by taking the evolution of node battery and traffic into account. In this paper, we present a hybrid agent-based architecture that addresses the problem of depleting nodes during the maintenance phase of a MWSN. Agents, each assigned to a node, collaborate and adapt their behaviour to their battery levels. The collaborative behavior is modeled through the willingness to interact abstraction, which defines when agents ask and give help to one another. Thus, depleting nodes may ask to be replaced by healthier counterparts and move to areas with less traffic or to a collection point. At the lower level, negotiations trigger a reactive navigation behaviour based on Social Potential Fields (SPF). It is shown that the proposed method improves coverage and extends network longevity in an environment without obstacles as compared to SPF alone.
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| 4. |
- Frasheri, Mirgita, et al.
(author)
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Analysis of perceived helpfulness in adaptive autonomous agent populations
- 2018
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In: Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XXVIII. - Cham : Springer Verlag. - 9783319783017 ; , s. 221-252
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Adaptive autonomy allows agents to change their autonomy levels based on circumstances, e.g. when they decide to rely upon one another for completing tasks. In this paper, two configurations of agent models for adaptive autonomy are discussed. In the former configuration, the adaptive autonomous behavior is modeled through the willingness of an agent to assist others in the population. An agent that completes a high number of tasks, with respect to a predefined threshold, increases its willingness, and vice-versa. Results show that, agents complete more tasks when they are willing to give help, however the need for such help needs to be low. Agents configured to be helpful will perform well among alike agents. The second configuration extends the first by adding the willingness to ask for help. Furthermore, the perceived helpfulness of the population and of the agent asking for help are used as input in the calculation of the willingness to give help. Simulations were run for three different scenarios. (i) A helpful agent which operates among an unhelpful population, (ii) an unhelpful agent which operates in a helpful populations, and (iii) a population split in half between helpful and unhelpful agents. Results for all scenarios show that, by using such trait of the population in the calculation of willingness and given enough interactions, helpful agents can control the degree of exploitation by unhelpful agents. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018.
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| 5. |
- Frasheri, Mirgita, et al.
(author)
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Comparison Between Static and Dynamic Willingness to Interact in Adaptive Autonomous Agents
- 2018
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In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence. - : SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications. - 9789897582752 ; , s. 258-267
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Adaptive autonomy (AA) is a behavior that allows agents to change their autonomy levels by reasoning on their circumstances. Previous work has modeled AA through the willingness to interact, composed of willingness to ask and give assistance. The aim of this paper is to investigate, through computer simulations, the behavior of agents given the proposed computational model with respect to different initial configurations, and level of dependencies between agents. Dependency refers to the need for help that one agent has. Such need can be fulfilled by deciding to depend on other agents. Results show that, firstly, agents whose willingness to interact changes during run-time perform better compared to those with static willingness parameters, i.e. willingness with fixed values. Secondly, two strategies for updating the willingness are compared, (i) the same fixed value is updated on each interaction, (ii) update is done on the previous calculated value. The maximum number of completed tasks which need assistance is achieved for (i), given specific initial configurations.
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| 6. |
- Frasheri, Mirgita, et al.
(author)
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Failure Analysis for Adaptive Autonomous Agents using Petri Nets
- 2017
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In: Proceedings of the 2017 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, FedCSIS 2017. - 9788394625375 ; , s. 293-297
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Adaptive autonomous (AA) agents are able to make their own decisions on when and with whom to share their autonomy based on their states. Whereas dependability gives evidence on whether a system, (e.g. an agent team), and its provided services are to be trusted. In this paper, an initial analysis on AA agents with respect to dependability is conducted. Firstly, AA is modeled through a pairwise relationship called willingness of agents to interact, i.e. to ask for and give assistance. Secondly, dependability is evaluated by considering solely the reliability attribute, which presents the continuity of correct services. The failure analysis is realized by modeling the agents through Petri Nets. Simulation results indicate that agents drop slightly more tasks when they are more willing to interact than otherwise, especially when the fail-rate of individual agents increases. Conclusively, the willingness should be tweaked such that there is compromise between performance and helpfulness.
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| 7. |
- Frasheri, Mirgita, et al.
(author)
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GLocal : A Hybrid Approach to the Multi-Agent Mission Re-Planning Problem
- 2020
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Multi-robot systems can be prone to failures during plan execution, depending on the harshness of the environment they are deployed in. As a consequence, initially devised plans may no longer be feasible, and a re-planning process needs to take place to re-allocate any pending tasks. Two main approaches emerge as possible solutions, a global re-planning technique using a centralized planner that will redo the task allocation with the updated world state information, or a decentralized approach that will focus on the local plan reparation, i.e., the re-allocation of those tasks initially assigned to the failed robots.The former approach produces an overall better solution, while the latter is less computationally expensive.The goal of this paper is to exploit the benefits of both approaches, while minimizing their drawbacks. To this end, we propose a hybrid approach {that combines a centralized planner with decentralized multi-agent planning}. In case of an agent failure, the local plan reparation algorithm tries to repair the plan through agent negotiation. If it fails to re-allocate all of the pending tasks, the global re-planning algorithm is invoked, which re-allocates all unfinished tasks from all agents.The hybrid approach was compared to planner approach, and it was shown that it improves on the makespan of a mission in presence of different numbers of failures,as a consequence of the local plan reparation algorithm.
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| 8. |
- Frasheri, Mirgita
(author)
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Modelling and Control of the Collaborative Behavior of Adaptive Autonomous Agents
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Research on autonomous agents and vehicles has gained momentum in the past years, which is reflected in the extensive body of literature and the investment of big players of the industry in the development of products such as self-driving cars. Additionally, these systems are envisioned to continuously communicate and cooperate with one another in order to adapt to dynamic circumstances and unforeseeable events, and as a result will they fulfil their goals even more efficiently.The facilitation of such dynamic collaboration and the modelling of interactions between different actors (software agents, humans) remains an open challenge.This thesis tackles the problem of enabling dynamic collaboration by investigating the automated adjustment of autonomy of different agents, called Adaptive Autonomy (AA). An agent, in this context, is a software able to process and react to sensory inputs in the environment in which it is situated in, and is additionally capable of autonomous actions. In this work, the collaborative adaptive autonomous behaviour of agents is shaped by their willingness to interact with other agents, that captures the disposition of an agent to give and ask for help, based on different factors that represent the agent's state and its interests.The AA approach to collaboration is used in two different domains: (i) the hunting mobile search problem, and (ii) the coverage problem of mobile wireless sensor networks. In both cases, the proposed approach is compared to state-of-art methods.Furthermore, the thesis contributes on a conceptual level by combining and integrating the AA approach -- which is purely distributed -- with a high-level mission planner, in order to exploit the ability of dealing with local and contingent problems through the AA approach, while minimising the requests for a re-plan to the mission planner.
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| 9. |
- Frasheri, Mirgita, et al.
(author)
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Towards Collaborative Adaptive Autonomous Agents
- 2017
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In: ICAART. - : SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications. ; , s. 78-87
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Adaptive autonomy enables agents operating in an environment to change, or adapt, their autonomy levels by relying on tasks executed by others. Moreover, tasks could be delegated between agents, and as a result decision-making concerning them could also be delegated. In this work, adaptive autonomy is modeled through the willingness of agents to cooperate in order to complete abstract tasks, the latter with varying levels of dependencies between them. Furthermore, it is sustained that adaptive autonomy should be considered at an agent's architectural level. Thus the aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, the initial concept of an agent architecture is proposed and discussed from an agent interaction perspective. Secondly, the relations between static values of willingness to help, dependencies between tasks and overall usefulness of the agents' population are analysed. The results show that a unselfish population will complete more tasks than a selfish one for low dependency degrees. However, as the latter increases more tasks are dropped, and consequently the utility of the population degrades. Utility is measured by the number of tasks that the population completes during run-time. Finally, it is shown that agents are able to finish more tasks by dynamically changing their willingness to cooperate.
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| 10. |
- Hanna, Atieh, 1973-
(author)
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Towards intelligent and collaborative automation of automotive final assembly
- 2021
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Automation and robotics have transformed the automotive industry by increasing efficiency and improving product quality. However, in manual final assembly and material handling in the truck industry, where the environment is crowded and the process is complex, it is hard to automate using traditional industrial robots. Due to the new trends of self-driving, electrification, and connectivity, the truck variants will drastically increase, which will require a new type of flexible, intelligent and reconfigurable production system where humans and robots collaborate to handle the upcoming complexity.Collaborative robot systems are designed to enable collaboration between humans and robots. They can be flexible and easier to use and install compared to traditional robots while relieving the human from the unergonomic and more monotonous tasks and freeing up his/her time for more value-adding operations. However, despite the great amount of research and industrial effort in promoting collaborative robots, they are underused and are mostly installed to handle simpler tasks, like traditional robots but without fences.The main aim of this work is to increase the understanding of how to introduce intelligent and collaborative robot systems into complex applications such as final assembly. Two demonstrators were developed by the research group where a manual final assembly station and a kitting station were transformed into collaborative assembly and kitting stations. Based on these industrial use cases, a set of challenges and critical requirements have been identified that need to be addressed. These requirements are related to safe, efficient and intuitive interactions, tools, deliberative control, robust communication and variant handling. The most critical requirement is the safety of machines and humans. In this work, by evaluating the current safety standards, it is identified that the available collaborative modes do not support the implementation of intelligent and adaptive collaborative systems in complex applications. A new collaborative mode is therefore suggested for deliberative and adaptive systems where robot system and operator plan, deliberate, adapt and act together.Even if it would be possible to develop a safe and fully working collaborative and intelligent automation system, the engineering processes must also be transformed to be able to design, plan, prepare, and to manage product and process changes for these new systems. Based on the studied use cases, possible solutions for the future planning and preparation process are also proposed in this thesis.
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