Search results for "robotics."
showing 10 items of 473 documents
“It Is Not the Robot Who Learns, It Is Me.” Treating Severe Dysgraphia Using Child–Robot Interaction
2021
Writing disorders are frequent and impairing. However, social robots may help to improve children's motivation and to propose enjoyable and tailored activities. Here, we have used the Co-writer scenario in which a child is asked to teach a robot how to write via demonstration on a tablet, combined with a series of games we developed to train specifically pressure, tilt, speed, and letter liaison controls. This setup was proposed to a 10-year-old boy with a complex neurodevelopmental disorder combining phonological disorder, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and developmental coordination disorder with severe dysgraphia. Writing impairments were severe and limited his parti…
A Planning and Control System for Self-Driving Racing Vehicles
2018
Autonomous robots will soon enter our everyday life as self-driving cars. These vehicles are designed to behave according to certain sets of cooperative rules, such as traffic ones, and to respond to events that might be unpredictable in their occurrence but predictable in their nature, such as a pedestrian suddenly crossing a street, or another car losing control. As civilian autonomous cars will cross the road, racing autonomous cars are under development, which will require superior Artificial Intelligence Drivers to perform in structured but uncertain conditions. We describe some preliminary results obtained during the development of a planning and control system as key elements of an A…
Moiré with zone plates pseudo-randomly encoded
1993
Abstract Moire patterns are a convenient method for optically sensing lateral displacements, or in-plane rotations. Sharp moire fringes are here created by using two zone plates, pseudo-randomly encoded. Our results may be useful in metrology, optical testing, and robotics. Experimental results are reported.
Heuristics for solving the parameter tuning problem in motion cueing algorithms.
2017
[ES] Diversos tipos de plataformas robóticas son empleadas habitualmente para la generación de claves gravito-inerciales en simuladores. Además del control de los actuadores, dichas plataformas deben ejecutar complejos algoritmos de control conocidos como algoritmos de washout, que deben ser ajustados para que el movimiento generado sea similar al simulado. El ajuste de dichos algoritmos es complejo por el elevado número de parámetros que poseen. Además, dicho ajuste se ha venido realizando tradicionalmente de modo manual mediante evaluaciones subjetivas. En este trabajo, los autores proponen un método automático de ajuste basado en optimización heurística, métricas objetivas, y simulación …
UWSim-NET: An Open-Source Framework for Experimentation in Communications for Underwater Robotics
2019
The communication with the remotely operated vehicles (ROV) in underwater applications are usually based on umbilical cables. The increase in the number of ROVs in cooperative interventions motivates the interest in underwater wireless communications. They have a high impact in robotic applications because of their limited performance in underwater scenarios. In this work we present UWSim-NET, an extension of the simulator for underwater robotics UWSim, which is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). UWSim-NET integrates a communications module based on Network Simulator 3 (NS3) that allows to model the physical and data link layers. Experiments demonstrating the capabilities of UWSim-N…
OMNI-DRL: Learning to Fly in Forests with Omnidirectional Images
2022
Perception is crucial for drone obstacle avoidance in complex, static, and unstructured outdoor environments. However, most navigation solutions based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) use limited Field-Of-View (FOV) images as input. In this paper, we demonstrate that omnidirectional images improve these methods. Thus, we provide a comparative benchmark of several visual modalities for navigation: ground truth depth, ground truth semantic segmentation, and RGB images. These exhaustive comparisons reveal that it is superior to use an omnidirectional camera to navigate with classical DRL methods. Finally, we show in two different virtual forest environments that adapting the convolution to…
A cognitive architecture for robot self-consciousness
2008
Objective: One of the major topics towards robot consciousness is to give a robot the capabilities of self-consciousness. We propose that robot self-consciousness is based on higher order perception of the robot, in the sense that first-order robot perception is the immediate perception of the outer world, while higher order perception is the perception of the inner world of the robot. Methods and material: We refer to a robot cognitive architecture that has been developed during almost 10 years at the RoboticsLab of the University of Palermo. The architecture is organized in three computational areas. The subconceptual area is concerned with the low level processing of perceptual data comi…
An Emphatic Humanoid Robot with Emotional Latent Semantic Behavior
2008
In this paper we propose an Entertainment Humanoid Robot model based on Latent Semantic Analysis, that tries to exhibit an emotional behavior in the interaction with human. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), based on vector space allows the coding of the words semantics by specific statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. We illustrate how the creation and the use of this emotional conceptual space can provide a framework upon which to build “Latent Semantic Behavior” because it simulates the emotionalassociative capabilities of human beings. This approach integrates traditional knowledge representation with intuitive capabilities provided by geometric and sub-symbolic infor…
The perception loop in CiceRobot, a museum guide robot
2009
The paper discusses a model of robot perception based on a comparison loop process between the actual and the expected robot input sensory data generated by a 3D robot/environment simulator. The perception loop process is operating in CiceRobot, a functional robot architecture implemented on an autonomous robot RWI B21 offering guided tours at the Archaeological Museum of Agrigento, Italy.
Magnetic dipole with a flexible tail as a self-propelling microdevice.
2012
By numerical simulations, it is illustrated that a magnetic dipole with a flexible tail behaves as a swimmer in AC magnetic fields. The behavior of the swimmer on long time scales is analyzed and it is shown that due to the flexibility of the tail two kinds of torques arise, the first is responsible for the orientation of the swimmer perpendicularly to the AC field and the second drags the filament in the direction of the rotating field. Due to this, circular trajectories of the swimmer are possible; however, these are unstable. The self-propulsion velocity of this swimmer is higher than the velocities of other magnetic microdevices for comparable values of the magnetoelastic number.