Robot combatRobot combat is a mode of robot competition in which custom-built machines fight using various methods to incapacitate each other. The machines have generally been remote-controlled vehicles rather than autonomous robots. Robot combat competitions have been made into television series, including Robot Wars in the UK and BattleBots in the US. These shows were originally broadcast in the late 1990s to early 2000s and experienced revivals in the mid-2010s.
Head-on collisionA head-on collision is a traffic collision where the front ends of two vehicles such as cars, trains, ships or planes hit each other when travelling in opposite directions, as opposed to a side collision or rear-end collision. With railways, a head-on collision occurs most often on a single line railway. This usually means that at least one of the trains has passed a signal at danger, or that a signalman has made a major error. Head-on collisions may also occur at junctions, for similar reasons.
Social robotA social robot is an autonomous robot that interacts and communicates with humans or other autonomous physical agents by following social behaviors and rules attached to its role. Like other robots, a social robot is physically embodied (avatars or on-screen synthetic social characters are not embodied and thus distinct) Some synthetic social agents are designed with a screen to represent the head or 'face' to dynamically communicate with users.
RoombaRoomba is a series of autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners made by the company iRobot. Introduced in September 2002, they have a set of sensors that enable them to navigate the floor area of a home. These sensors can detect the presence of obstacles, particularly dirty spots on the floor, and steep drops (e.g., to avoid falling down stairs). As of 2022, iRobot markets models of their 600, i, j, Combo and s9 series, while continuing to provide support and sell accessories for their previous series.
RoboticsRobotics is an interdisciplinary branch of electronics and communication, computer science and engineering. Robotics involves the design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrates fields of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, information engineering, mechatronics engineering, electronics, biomedical engineering, computer engineering, control systems engineering, software engineering, mathematics, etc.
Nao (robot)Nao (pronounced now) is an autonomous, programmable humanoid robot formerly developed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French robotics company headquartered in Paris, which was acquired by SoftBank Group in 2015 and rebranded as SoftBank Robotics. The robot's development began with the launch of Project Nao in 2004. On 15 August 2007, Nao replaced Sony's robot dog Aibo as the robot used in the RoboCup Standard Platform League (SPL), an international robot soccer competition.
Configuration space (physics)In classical mechanics, the parameters that define the configuration of a system are called generalized coordinates, and the space defined by these coordinates is called the configuration space of the physical system. It is often the case that these parameters satisfy mathematical constraints, such that the set of actual configurations of the system is a manifold in the space of generalized coordinates. This manifold is called the configuration manifold of the system. Notice that this is a notion of "unrestricted" configuration space, i.
Swarm behaviourSwarm behaviour, or swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by entities, particularly animals, of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving en masse or migrating in some direction. It is a highly interdisciplinary topic. As a term, swarming is applied particularly to insects, but can also be applied to any other entity or animal that exhibits swarm behaviour.
Artificial neural networkArtificial neural networks (ANNs, also shortened to neural networks (NNs) or neural nets) are a branch of machine learning models that are built using principles of neuronal organization discovered by connectionism in the biological neural networks constituting animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected units or nodes called artificial neurons, which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. Each connection, like the synapses in a biological brain, can transmit a signal to other neurons.
Vanishing gradient problemIn machine learning, the vanishing gradient problem is encountered when training artificial neural networks with gradient-based learning methods and backpropagation. In such methods, during each iteration of training each of the neural networks weights receives an update proportional to the partial derivative of the error function with respect to the current weight. The problem is that in some cases, the gradient will be vanishingly small, effectively preventing the weight from changing its value.
