1,721,369 research outputs found
A fabric-based approach for wearable haptics
Full text linkIn recent years, wearable haptic systems (WHS) have gained increasing attention as a novel and exciting paradigm for human-robot interaction (HRI).These systems can be worn by users, carried around, and integrated in their everyday lives, thus enabling a more natural manner to deliver tactile cues.At the same time, the design of these types of devices presents new issues: the challenge is the correct identification of design guidelines, with the two-fold goal of minimizing system encumbrance and increasing the effectiveness and naturalness of stimulus delivery.Fabrics can represent a viable solution to tackle these issues.They are specifically thought “to be worn”, and could be the key ingredient to develop wearable haptic interfaces conceived for a more natural HRI.In this paper, the author will review some examples of fabric-based WHS that can be applied to different body locations, and elicit different haptic perceptions for different application fields.Perspective and future developments of this approach will be discussed
Una storia impossibile. La ricezione di Pasolini nella letteratura italiana del XXI secolo
Full text linkFocusing on contemporary writers and critics, this essay investigates Pasolini’s problematic inheritance within the Italian literature. I shall show that, in fact, no contemporary Italian writer had, nor could, accept this inheritance. With this, I also show the problematic relation between Pasolini and the last generation of Italian writers
Gli alberi della savana: le sopravvivenze del passato
Full text linkIn his work Pasolini shows great interest in the past and in otherness as represented by the farmers and labourers from Friuli, underclass Romans, and the poor of the Third World. This essay focuses on the documentary Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana, which can be interpreted as using the concept of the trace as it was theorized by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his Les tempes et récit, and illustrates what Pasolini meant by the idea of the survival of the past in the present. The aim of the essay is to demonstrate the importance of taking Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana as the turning point in Pasolini’s career, marking the change from his early representations of the Friulian and the Roman to the later apocalyptic writings of Scritti corsari and Petrolio
Editorial: Mapping Human Sensory-Motor Skills for Manipulation Onto the Design and Control of Robots
Full text linkThe extraordinary human sensory-motor capabilities arise from the interaction with the external
world and the interplay of different elements, which are controlled within a space whose
dimensionality is lower than the available number of dimensions, as suggested by the concept of
synergies, see (e.g., Turvey, 2007; Latash, 2008; Santello et al., 2013). This general simplification
approach has then been successfully used in robotics, to inform the development of simple yet
effective artificial devices, see (e.g., Santello et al., 2016). Mutual inspiration between robotics
and neuroscience could hence be the key to advance both these disciplines: through a bio-aware
approach for the design of mechatronic systems, on one side, and the deployment of technical
tools for novel neuroscientific experiments, on the other. The manuscripts presented in this e-book
shed light on the organization of human sensory-motor architecture, presenting instruments and
mechatronic systems that can be successfully applied to neuroscientific investigation. At the same
time, we report on robotic translations of neuroscientific outcomes
Design and characterization of a fabric-based softness display
Full text linkTo enable a realistic tactile interaction with remote or virtual objects, softness information represents a fundamental property to be rendered via haptic devices. What is challenging is to reduce the complexity of such an information as it arises from contact mechanics and to find suitable simplifications that can lead an effective development of softness displays. A possible approach is to surrogate detailed tactile cues with information on the rate of spread of the contact area between the object and the finger as the contact force increases, i.e. force/area relation. This paradigm is called contact area spread rate. In this paper we discuss how such a paradigm has inspired the design of a tactile device (hereinafter referred to as Fabric Yielding Display, FYD-2), which exploits the elasticity of a fabric to mimic different levels of stiffness, while the contact area on the finger indenting the fabric is measured. In this manner, the FYD-2 can be controlled to reproduce force-area characteristics. In this work, we describe the FYD-2 architecture and report a psychophysical characterization. FYD-2 is shown to be able to accurately reproduce force-area curves of typical objects and to enable a reliable softness discrimination in human users
Multi-cue haptic guidance through wearables for enhancing human ergonomics
Full text linkWearable haptic systems can be easily integrated with the human body and represent an effective solution for a natural and unobtrusive stimulus delivery. These characteristics can open interesting perspectives for different applications, such as haptic guidance for human ergonomics enhancement, e.g. during human-robot collaborative tasks in industrial scenarios, where the usage of the visual communication channel can be problematic. In this work, we propose a wearable multi-cue system that can be worn at the arm level on both the two upper limbs, which conveys both squeezing stimuli (provided by an armband haptic device) and vibration, to provide corrective feedback for posture balancing along the user's frontal and sagittal plane, respectively. We evaluated the effectiveness of our system in delivering directional information to control the user's center of pressure position on a balancing board. We compared the here proposed haptic guidance with visual guidance cues. Results show no statistically significant differences in terms of success rate and time for task completion for the two conditions. Furthermore, participants underwent through a Subjective Quantitative Evaluation and a NASA-TLX test, evaluating the wearable haptic system as intuitive and effective
Synergy-Based Hand Pose Sensing: Optimal Glove Design
Full text linkIn this paper we study the problem of optimally designing glove–based sensing
devices for hand pose reconstruction to maximize their potential for precision.
In a companion paper we studied the problem of maximizing the reconstruction accuracy of the hand pose from partial and noisy data provided by any given pose sensing device (a sensorized “glove”) taking into account the knowledge on how humans most frequently use their hands in grasping tasks. In this paper we consider the dual problem of how to design pose sensing devices, i.e. how and where to place sensors on a glove, to get maximum information about the actual hand posture. We study the optimal design of gloves of different nature, according to a classification of current sensing technologies adopted in the domain. The objective is to provide, for given a priori information and fixed number of sensor inputs, the optimal design minimizing the reconstruction error statistics (assuming that optimal reconstruction algorithms are adopted). Finally, an experimental evaluation of the proposed method for optimal design is provided
Procedimento di ricostruzione virtuale della posa reale di una porzione di corpo umano
No full textViene previsto un procedimento di ricostruzione virtuale di una posa reale (1a) di almeno una porzione di corpo avente un numero n di gradi di libertà reali (z); det-to procedimento di ricostruzione virtuale (1) comprende una fase di acquisizione (2) in cui, della posa reale (1a), sono misurati dei gradi di libertà selezionati (y) corrispondenti ad almeno una parte dei gradi di libertà reali (z); ed una fase di stima (3) in cui i gradi di libertà virtuali (x) della riproduzione virtuale (1b) sono calcolati in funzione dei gradi di libertà selezionati (y) e di sinergie posturali calco-late in funzione di un database a priori di pose della porzione di corpo
Le tracce di un passato ancestrale: mito e storia in Pier Paolo Pasolini
Full text linkIn a context of comparative theory this essay focuses on the myth of childhood in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work. By analyzing his Friulan period in some of his films and several dreams, it can be noticed how some recurrent symbols of his work, realize that desire of retrogradation backward to barbarism, represented by his mother through a psychoanalytical perspective.
The aim of the present dissertation is to present how Friuli is a constant presence in all Pasolini’s activity. For this persistence the poet shows a great interest in the past and in the otherness, embodied by the boys of Casarsa, the lowest among the roman classes and the poorest from the Third World. In this way Pasolini appears to the reader in all its phenomenological complexity, that only in virtue of the «concrete imagination» it can be made more clear
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