CogNovo research fellow Christos Melidis and his co-authors Hiroyuki Iizuka and Davide Marocco, publish the article "Intuitive control of mobile robots: an architecture for autonomous adaptive dynamic behaviour integration" in Springer's Cognitive Processing journal.
In this article, a novel approach to human–robot control is presented. Taking inspiration from behaviour-based robotics and self-organisation principles, an interfacing mechanism is presented, with the ability to adapt both towards the user and the robotic morphology. The aim is for a transparent mechanism connecting user and robot, allowing for a seamless integration of control signals and robot behaviours. Instead of the user adapting to the interface and control paradigm, the proposed architecture allows the user to shape the control motifs in their way of preference, moving away from the case where the user has to read and understand an operation manual, or it has to learn to operate a specific device. Starting from a tabula rasa basis, the architecture is able to identify control patterns (behaviours) for the given robotic morphology and successfully merge them with control signals from the user, regardless of the input device used.
This research article is part of Christos' Thesis titled "Adaptive Neural Architectures for Intuitive Robot Control", and provides a detailed explanation and experiments of the proposed -novel- system in a control scenario of an 'e-puck' robot.