Chris Lytridis

• PhD in Robotics
• Researcher at Democritus University of Thrace

Weeds are one of the primary concerns in agriculture since they compete with crops for nutrients and water, and they also attract insects and pests and are, therefore, hindering crop yield. Moreover, seasonal labour shortages necessitate the automation of such agricultural tasks using machines. For this reason, advances in agricultural robotics hav...

The development of agricultural robots is an increasingly popular research field aiming at addressing the widespread labor shortages in the farming industry and the ever-increasing food production demands. In many cases, multiple cooperating robots can be deployed in order to reduce task duration, perform an operation not possible with a single rob...

In the viticulture sector, robots are being employed more frequently to increase productivity and accuracy in operations such as vineyard mapping, pruning, and harvesting, especially in locations where human labor is in short supply or expensive. This paper presents the development of an algorithm for grape maturity estimation in the framework of v...

Sustainable agricultural production, under the current world population explosion, calls for agricultural robot operations that are personalized, i.e., locally adjusted, rather than en masse. This work proposes implementing such operations based on logic in order to ensure that a reasonable operation is applied locally. In particular, the interest...

The viticultural sector is facing a significant maturation phase, dealing with environmental challenges to reduce agrochemical application and energy consumption, while labor shortages are increasing throughout Europe and beyond. Autonomous collaborative robots are an emerging technology and an alternative to the scarcity of human labor in agricult...

The development of an effective agricultural robot presents various challenges in actuation, localization, navigation, sensing, etc., depending on the prescribed task. Moreover, when multiple robots are engaged in an agricultural task, this requires appropriate coordination strategies to be developed to ensure safe, effective, and efficient operati...

Difficulties with social interaction characterise children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and have a negative impact in their everyday life. Integrating a social-humanoid robot within the standard clinical treatment has been proven promising. The main aim of this randomised controlled study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a robot-assisted psyc...

(1) Background: There has been significant recent interest in the potential role of social robots (SRs) in special education. Specific Learning Disorders (SpLDs) have a high prevalence in the student population, and early intervention with personalized special educational programs is crucial for optimal academic achievement. (2) Methods: We designe...

Robots are more and more present in our lives, particularly in the health sector. In therapeutic centers, some therapists are beginning to explore various tools like video games, Internet exchanges, and robot-assisted therapy. These tools will be at the disposal of these professionals as additional resources that can support them to assist their pa...

Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of social robots in various domains including special education. However, specialized tools to assess their effect on human behavior, as well as to holistically design social robot applications, are often missing. In response, this work presents novel tools for analysis of human behavior data regarding...

During the last decade, there has been an increased interest in research on the use of social robots in education, both in typical education as well as in special education. Despite the demonstrated advantages of robot-assisted tutoring in typical education and the extensive work on robots in supporting autism therapy-related scenarios, little work...

Social robots keep proliferating. A critical challenge remains their sensible interaction with humans, especially in real world applications. Hence, computing with real world semantics is instrumental. Recently, the Lattice Computing (LC) paradigm has been proposed with a capacity to compute with semantics represented by partial order in a mathemat...

Agricultural robotics has been a popular subject in recent years from an academic as well as a commercial point of view. This is because agricultural robotics addresses critical issues such as seasonal shortages in manual labor, e.g., during harvest, as well as the increasing concern regarding environmentally friendly practices. On one hand, severa...

This work represents any distribution of data by an Intervals’ Number (IN), hence it represents all-order data statistics, using a “small” number of L intervals. The INs considered are induced from images of grapes that ripen. The objective is the accurate prediction of grape maturity. Based on an established algebra of INs, an optimizable IN-regre...

This work represents any distribution of data by an Intervals’ Number (IN), hence it represents all-order data statistics, using a “small” number of L intervals. The INs considered are induced from images of grapes that ripen. The objective is the accurate prediction of grape maturity. Based on an established algebra of INs, an optimizable IN-regre...

The task of child engagement estimation when interacting with a social robot during a special educational procedure is studied. A multimodal machine learning-based methodology for estimating the engagement of the children with learning difficulties, participating in appropriate designed educational scenarios, is proposed. For this purpose, visual a...

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) applications including human-robot interaction call for automated reasoning for rational decision-making. In the latter context, typically, audio-visual signals are employed. Τhis work considers brain signals for emotion recognition towards an effective human-robot interaction. An ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) signal here...

In this paper the problem of algorithms’ interoperability in the context of an intelligent child-robot interaction for special education is studied. Given a technically demanding intervention scenario designed by experts, the set of algorithms that needed to implement the scenario are defined explicitly. Following a test case implementation involvi...

Advances in robot capabilities over the last few years have resulted in the introduction of robots in many disciplines. Amongst them, the field of special education attracts scientific attention, towards studying the effect of social robots in the treatment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This paper presents a pilot study in a real...

Human-robot interaction has been a significant area of research with the widespread use of social robots. Many modalities can be used to achieve interaction, including vision. For each modality, many methodologies have been proposed, with varying degrees of effectiveness and efficiency in terms of the computational power needed. The varied nature o...

In this paper we propose a different strategy to produce a 24-hours ahead PV power forecasts. The main idea consists in developing a set of simple univariate models based on Least square Support Vector Regression (LsSVR), each of the developed models will forecast the PV power of each 30 minutes of the next day. To compare LsSVR results and also to...

Visual stimuli are essential in many applications in human robot interaction. However, such tasks are usually computationally intensive. Also, data received from the various sensors on a robot require different data representation and processing techniques, which increases the complexity and makes the fusion of sensory data for decision making more...

The use of social robots in special education has been the subject of numerous research studies in recent years. The objective of these studies is to use robots as tools in order to facilitate and enhance supporting interventions in special education. The research so far generally shows that robot-assisted interventions yield several benefits. For...

Advances in robot capabilities over the last few years have resulted in the introduction of robots in many disciplines. Amongst them, the field of special education attracts scientific attention, towards studying the effect of social robots in the treatment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This paper presents a pilot study in a real...

In this paper the problem of algorithms' interoperability in the context of an intelligent child-robot interaction for special education is studied. Given a technically demanding intervention scenario designed by experts, the set of algorithms that needed to implement the scenario are defined explicitly. Following a test case implementation involvi...

448.001- A Feasibility Study to Evaluate the Application of a Robot-Assisted ASD Intervention in Greece Background: Robot-assisted therapy in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) gained a lot of attention the last decade with promising results (Begum, Serna, & Yanco, 2016; Ismail, et al., 2019; Pennisi et al., 2016; Smeekens et al., 2018). Larger clini...

The outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) has resulted in a significant disruption of almost all aspects of everyday life. Several governments around the world have adopted emergency actions to reduce spreading of the virus, which included suspension of non-essential activities and the implementation of social di...

Our interest is in time series classification regarding cyber–physical systems (CPSs) with emphasis in human-robot interaction. We propose an extension of the k nearest neighbor (kNN) classifier to time-series classification using intervals’ numbers (INs). More specifically, we partition a time-series into windows of equal length and from each wind...

The introduction of social robots in education has been a major theme in robotics research in recent years. Various studies have been conducted that demonstrate the merits of using robots as teachers or teacher assistants. These studies are mainly focused on activities where the child interacts with the robot to achieve a certain educational or the...

Speech is one of the major human-machine interaction modalities and it is especially important in the case of special education using social robots. Although modern speech recognition engines can effectively deal with normal human-robot conversations, there are instances in special education where additional word detection and word comparison capab...

For a number of years robots have been widely used in industry mainly for assembly tasks and other automated processes. Advances in robot hardware and software have significantly improved the capabilities of robots and have led researchers to investigate the potential uses of robots in other fields where more autonomy, intelligence and higher level...

Children with autism are characterized by impairments in communication, social interaction and information processing. This work presents a module to encourage children with autism to improve their social and communication skills, through a specially designed game-based approach. The humanoid robot NAO is utilized to autonomously engage with a chil...

The effectiveness of human-robot interaction depends on the capacity of a robot to modulate its behaviour according to human emotion(s). This work presents preliminary results regarding a Behaviour Modulation System (BeMoSys) implementable on a social robot with a capacity for emotional speech recognition based on signal-processing followed by mach...

Educational robotics (ER) have demonstrated their positive effect in introducing scientific concepts. This paper presents an innovative approach to introduce arithmetic to elementary school students, with the aid of a social robot-assistant. The proposed innovative approach is a game-based learning activity, specially designed for K-12 educational...

Augmented Reality (AR) has seen a significant increase in applications in a number of fields in recent years. One of the areas in which AR has been applied to is education, most commonly by means of augmenting educational books. The present paper builds on previous work by using an AR authoring environment and a mobile application, developed by the...

The effectiveness of human-robot interaction depends on the capacity of a robot to modulate its behaviour according to human emotion(s). This work presents preliminary results regarding a Behaviour Modulation System (BeMoSys) implementable on a social robot with a capacity for emotional speech recognition based on signal-processing followed by mach...

Augmented Reality (AR) has been used in various contexts in recent years in order to enhance user experiences in mobile and wearable devices. Various studies have shown the utility of AR, especially in the field of education, where it has been observed that learning results are improved. However, such applications require specialized teams of softw...

This paper investigates the potential of using an augmented reality mobile application to teach mobile programming at an undergraduate level and presents the adopted development approach. For the purposes of this study, a mobile application has been developed using open source and free mobile development and augmented reality tools. The application...

Natural disasters often occur without warning and can cause significant damage. Greece suffers from a number of different types of natural disasters. Informing the community on disaster prevention and management issues, should start from the lowest levels of education and continued lifelong. Most of the times, children are informed about natural di...

This paper presents the design and implementation of a mobile learning platform developed at the Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology. The platform, named mLearn, aims at providing educators with the tools to organize and conduct educational field trips either outdoors (cities, sites etc.) or indoors (e.g. museums). The system consi...

In this short chapter, the Open Academic Courses project at the Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology is discussed. The various aspects of the project both in terms of equipment as well as human resources are described. The current state of the project is also presented. Finally, the various issues and challenges met during the proje...

This paper presents our blended learning approach for a continuing education short course at the Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology. During this short course, both distance learning and in-person laboratory sessions were realized. The way these two delivery methods were combined will be described in detail. Finally, the statistica...

In this paper, the Open Academic Courses project at the Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology is discussed and assessed. This project aims on the development of online courses with various types of educational content, such as e-books, podcasts, video-lectures etc. which are all open to the world. The open courses that were developed...

This paper presents an approach in mobile learning in which a commercial mobile application can be used for non-formal heritage education. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, an existing travel application for Android devices is adapted in order to demonstrate how educational elements with online interactive material about an a...

Arguably, chemical sensing is perhaps the most fundamental sensory modality in animals. This modality is far simpler than most other modalities (vision, hearing, heat sensing, electric and magnetic sensors) and yet navigation in a chemical diffusion field is still not well understood. Biological studies have already demonstrated the use of various...

Although chemical sensing is far simpler than vision or hearing, navigation in a chemical diffusion field is still not well understood. Biological studies have already demonstrated the use of various search methods (e.g., chemotaxis and biased random walk), but robotics research could provide new ways to investigate principles of olfactory-based se...

This thesis presents an investigation of odour source localisation using multiple cooperating robots. A cooperative strategy has been implemented for the control of multi-robot teams in order to demonstrate their advantages together with the improvements in carrying out cooperative search tasks. The odour source localisation experiments that are pr...

In this paper, the latest developments from research carried out by the Portsmouth/Leeds group on odour source localisation using multiple robots are presented. Previous studies have demonstrated the capability of individual robots to find an odour source using three biologically inspired navigational strategies, namely chemotaxis, biased random wa...

This paper presents the latest developments from research carried out by the Portsmouth/Leeds group regarding odour source localisation using co-operating mobile robots. Previous studies have demonstrated the capability of individual mobile robots to find an odour source using the biologically inspired navigational strategies (chemotaxis and biased...

This paper presents preliminary results from experiments using multiple mobile robots in odour source localisation. The objective of the experiments carried out is the successful navigation of multiple machines to an odour source. The searching strategies (i.e. chemotaxis and biased random walk) used by the individual robots have been demonstrated...

The paper presents the results of studies being carried out at Portsmouth regarding the properties of the Figaro TGS2620 general-purpose gas sensor and its possible use in mobile robot navigation. The sensor under investigation has previously been used in UoP's Smelly 2 prototype robot and its success in point odour source localisation has already...

Although most species are sensitive to various chemicals, and olfactory skills such as search strategies for finding nutritious substance are seemingly simple, these basic skills are still not fully understood. Traditionally, chemotaxis has been considered as the fundamental chemosensory navigational mechanism for most species. Previous studies hav...

The paper investigates the problem of cooperative target searching by autonomous agents. Specifically, the navigational task is to search for a target that is the sources of a chemical diffusion field. Previous studies have shown that the combination of the chemotaxis and biased random walking results in a robust navigational strategy for one agent...