An information model for modular robots: the Hardware Robot Information Model

Today's landscape of robotics is dominated by vertical integration where single vendors develop the final product leading to slow progress, expensive products and customer lock-in. Opposite to this, an horizontal integration would result in a rapid development of cost-effective mass-market products with an additional consumer empowerment. The transition of an industry from vertical integration to horizontal integration is typically catalysed by de facto industry standards that enable a simplified and seamless integration of products. However, in robotics there is currently no leading candidate for a global plug-and-play standard. This paper tackles the problem of incompatibility between robot components that hinder the reconfigurability and flexibility demanded by the robotics industry. Particularly, it presents a model to create plug-and-play robot hardware components. Rather than iteratively evolving previous ontologies, our proposed model answers the needs identified by the industry while facilitating interoperability, measurability and comparability of robotics technology. Our approach differs significantly with the ones presented before as it is hardware-oriented and establishes a clear set of actions towards the integration of this model in real environments and with real manufacturers.

Towards self-adaptable robots: from programming to training machines

We argue that hardware modularity plays a key role in the convergence of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce a new approach for building robots that leads to more adaptable and capable machines. We present the concept of a self-adaptable robot that makes use of hardware modularity and AI techniques to reduce the effort and time required to be built. We demonstrate in simulation and with a real robot how, rather than programming, training produces behaviors in the robot that generalize fast and produce robust outputs in the presence of noise. In particular, we advocate for mammals.

Dissecting Robotics - historical overview and future perspectives

Robotics is called to be the next technological revolution and estimations indicate that it will trigger the fourth industrial revolution. This article presents a review of some of the most relevant milestones that occurred in robotics over the last few decades and future perspectives. Despite the fact that, nowadays, robotics is an emerging field, the challenges in many technological aspects and more importantly bringing innovative solutions to the market still remain open. The need of reducing the integration time, costs and a common hardware infrastructure are discussed and further analysed in this work. We conclude with a discussion of the future perspectives of robotics as an engineering discipline and with suggestions for future research directions.