1,721,015 research outputs found
Our friend the robot
No full textWhenever I think of the future of robotics, what comes to mind is the image of a lady in her comfortable home in her unspecified city. She is quietly preparing a cake for a dinner that is coming up soon and is mixing the ingredients according to the recipe. This is not an unusual scene—rather it is both traditional and universal. It can take place in different parts of the planet, regardless of places and cultures. If we approach and observe well, however, we discover that the lady is not following a recipe book as my grandmother would have done, or a television program, as my mother would do today, or even using a smartphone with a trendy app, as my daughter normally does. On the contrary, the lady is talking with a kind of one-eyed table-top robotic lamp, whose head swivels, responds and follows the movements of her hands, measures the quantities of the ingredients, and corrects or suggests the actions to be carried out—how to mix, how to add more. It even praises or softly scolds if too many utensils are dirtied
The Robot and Us: An'Antidisciplinary'Perspective on the Scientific and Social Impacts of Robotics
No full textThis book offers a clear, yet comprehensive overview of the role of robots in our society. It especially focuses on the interaction between humans and robots, and on the social and political aspects of the integration of robots with humans, in their everyday life, both in the private and working sphere alike. Based on the lessons held by the author at “Scuola di Politiche”(transl. School of Political Sciences), this self-contained book mainly addresses an educated, though not-specialist, audience
On the way to robotics
No full textI do not intend to describe the history of robotics and its literary origin, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century, but I would like to trace the technological evolution of its applications, imagining a journey through time and space. My analysis strongly reflects my training as a bioengineer researcher who has always delved into the interaction between robotics and biomedicine. This is why I think it is useful to take a step back and describe my studies. I do not have a formal robotics background, also because at the end of the 80 s it was not yet a part of my future plans. As a scholar of physics, I learned and studied in research laboratories, in a “middle world”, on the border between microengineering, robotics and biomedical engineering and I think it is for these reasons that I have taken on board a research methodology oriented towards antidisciplinarity and guided by curiosity
Are we going through a real revolution?
No full textIt is not easy to understand if what we are experiencing is truly a new industrial revolution or a tail or a transformation of the previous one, the third revolution, which dates back to the late seventies and was originated by industrial automation, microelectronics and mechatronics. In an attempt to understand what is happening today in terms of the transformation of society and of the industrial revolution, it is necessary first of all to go back to the industrial revolutions, to their powerful impact on society, to the discontinuities that scientific discoveries and their subsequent transformation into technology and industry have produced over the years on society. This is not only on the manufacture of goods and services, but above all on the organization of work and on the quality of life
Control of Multifunctional Prosthetic Hands by Processing the Electromyographic Signal
No full textThe human hand is a complex system, with a large number of degrees of freedom (DoFs), sensors embedded in its structure, actuators and tendons, and a complex hierarchical control. Despite this complexity, the efforts required to the user to carry out the different movements is quite small (albeit after an appropriate and lengthy training). On the contrary, prosthetic hands are just a pale replication of the natural hand, with significantly reduced grasping capabilities and no sensory information delivered back to the user. Several attempts have been carried out to develop multifunctional prosthetic devices controlled by electromyographic (EMG) signals (myoelectric hands), harness (kinematic hands), dimensional changes in residual muscles, and so forth, but none of these methods permits the "natural" control of more than two DoFs. This article presents a review of the traditional methods used to control artificial hands by means of EMG signal, in both the clinical and research contexts, and introduces what could be the future developments in the control strategy of these devices
PCA-based myoelectric control of prehension for multi-articulated hand prostheses
No full textA successful substitution of the natural hand could be achieved only by developing an anthropomorphic device with high dexterity and an intuitive and easy-to-use control system. In this work a new approach to multi-Degrees-of-Freedom (DoFs) control based on Principal Components Analysis is proposed and assessed, which allows driving a 16-DoF multi-fingered hand prosthesis by means of only 2 differential EMG channels. Trials with able-bodied subjects demonstrated that they soon learned how to correctly operate the hand to firmly grasp objects, and confirmed that the developed control strategy is successful
Automation and autonomy: From a definition to the possible applications of artificial intelligence
No full textThere is a multitude of definitions of artificial intelligence (AI). The paper aims to provide keys of interpretation and a set of comprehensible definitions of AI, which are then utilized in multiple sub-fields of technology applications such as healthcare, education, security and defense. The analysis starts from providing a definition of the constituent elements of AI technology: Data, Big Data, Cloud, Algorithm and Machine Learning. The application of AI will also involve changes of a cultural and behavioral nature. These effects make it even more important to understand the impact that AI may have in technological, sociological, political and legal fields
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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