People have dreamed of machines, which would free them from unpleasant, dull, dirty and dangerous tasks and work for them as servants, for centuries if not millennia. Service robots seem to finally let these dreams come true. But where are all these robots that eventually serve us all day long, day for day? A few service robots have entered the market: domestic and professional cleaning robots, lawnmowers, milking robots, or entertainment robots. Some of these robots look more like toys or gadgets rather than real robots. But where is the rest? This is a question, which is asked not only by customers, but also by service providers, care organizations, politicians, and funding agencies. The answer is not very satisfying. Today’s service robots have their problems operating in everyday environments. This is by far more challenging than operating an industrial robot behind a fence. There is a comprehensive list of technical and scientific problems, which still need to be solved. To advance the state of the art in service robotics towards robots, which are capable of operating in an everyday environment, was the major objective of the DESIRE project (Deutsche Service Robotik Initiative – Germany Service Robotics Initiative) funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01IME01A. This book offers a sample of the results achieved in DESIRE.

People have dreamed of machines, which would free them from unpleasant, dull, dirty and dangerous tasks and work for them as servants, for centuries if not millennia. Service robots seem to finally let these dreams come true. But where are all these robots that eventually serve us all day long, day for day? A few service robots have entered the market: domestic and professional cleaning robots, lawnmowers, milking robots, or entertainment robots. Some of these robots look more like toys or gadgets rather than real robots. But where is the rest? This is a question, which is asked not only by customers, but also by service providers, care organizations, politicians, and funding agencies. The answer is not very satisfying. Today’s service robots have their problems operating in everyday environments. This is by far more challenging than operating an industrial robot behind a fence. There is a comprehensive list of technical and scientific problems, which still need to be solved. To advance the state of the art in service robotics towards robots, which are capable of operating in an everyday environment, was the major objective of the DESIRE project (Deutsche Service Robotik Initiative – Germany Service Robotics Initiative) funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01IME01A. This book offers a sample of the results achieved in DESIRE.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, PAAMS 2022, held in L'Aquila, Italy in July 2022. The 37 full papers in this book were reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. Another 10 demonstrations papers were selected from 11 submissions are presented here as short papers. The papers deal with the application and validation of agent-based models, methods, and technologies in a number of key applications areas, including: advanced models and learning, agent-based programming, decision-making, education and social interactions, formal and theoretic models, health and safety, mobility and the city, swarms and task allocation.

We feel the impact of robots on our lives more and more every day. Service robots constitute the broadest and the most exciting applications in this field, such as; personal care and assistance, agriculture, logistics, mobility, medical, and defense-oriented robots. Since service robotics contains many different types of robots, the variety of problems to be solved is also large. Many popular robotic problems, ranging from mechanism design to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), from motion planning to system security, can be examined in this context. You will find various examples and solutions for this critical area of robotics in this book. We hope that researchers interested in the subject will benefit from this book.

Service robots are designed to assist and aid humans in the day to day tasks as well as specific and minute tasks. In recent years there has been an increase in both demand and production of service robots. These robots are slowly becoming more prolific both in personal settings such as the home, and professional settings such as restaurants and hospitals. Despite this growth, there are still major challenges preventing service robots from being ubiquitous and operating intelligently in these unstructured domestic environments. Like many autonomous robots, the technical challenges of service robots revolve around three main facets: sensing and modeling their environment, understanding and reasoning about said environment, and acting in a way that is safe and conducive towards a task goal. Unlike industry robots, service robots operate in dynamic environments and have tasks that cannot always be completed repetitively. This presents a rich set of challenges to solve in all three areas. One exemplary task of this for service robots is tidying objects within the home. This task is important as it helps assist with activity of daily living (ADL) while meeting consumer demand. A few concrete illustrations of the challenges of this task are shown when we consider the robot must sense objects and ground language of these objects before we can determine where the objects belong. Notions of a correct placement vary as each user has their own personal preference to organization. Grasping and manipulating the objects as well as navigating within the environment must also be accomplished in order to successfully complete the task. In this dissertation we present several contributions that help address these challenges and the surrounding gaps towards solving these issues. First, we explore the use of a service robot to put away the groceries in a precise and stable configuration that satisfies the desired semantic relationship of grocery and pantry objects. Second we explore the ability of our robot to put away objects throughout a home environment based on a user preference using a recommender system approach. We share details of our implementation of these systems through real-world experiments.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2011, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in November 2011. The 23 revised full papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 51 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on social interaction with robots; nonverbal interaction with social robots; robots in society; social robots in education; affective interaction with social robots; robots in the home.