1,720,961 research outputs found
Ergonomic human-robot collaboration in industry: A review
Get PDFIn the current industrial context, the importance of assessing and improving workers’ health conditions is widely recognised. Both physical and psycho-social factors contribute to jeopardising the underlying comfort and well-being, boosting the occurrence of diseases and injuries, and affecting their quality of life. Human-robot interaction and collaboration frameworks stand out among the possible solutions to prevent and mitigate workplace risk factors. The increasingly advanced control strategies and planning schemes featured by collaborative robots have the potential to foster fruitful and efficient coordination during the execution of hybrid tasks, by meeting their human counterparts’ needs and limits. To this end, a thorough and comprehensive evaluation of an individual’s ergonomics, i.e. direct effect of workload on the human psycho-physical state, must be taken into account. In this review article, we provide an overview of the existing ergonomics assessment tools as well as the available monitoring technologies to drive and adapt a collaborative robot’s behaviour. Preliminary attempts of ergonomic human-robot collaboration frameworks are presented next, discussing state-of-the-art limitations and challenges. Future trends and promising themes are finally highlighted, aiming to promote safety, health, and equality in worldwide workplaces
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Open-VICO: An Open-Source Gazebo Toolkit for Vision-based Skeleton Tracking in Human-Robot Collaboration
No full textSimulation tools are essential for robotics research, especially for those domains in which safety is crucial, such as Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). However, it is challenging to simulate human behaviors, and existing robotics simulators do not integrate functional human models. This work presents Open-VICO, an open-source toolkit to integrate virtual human models in Gazebo focusing on vision-based human tracking. In particular, Open-VICO allows to combine in the same simulation environment realistic human kinematic models, multi-camera vision setups, and human-tracking techniques along with numerous robot and sensor models thanks to Gazebo. The possibility to incorporate pre-recorded human skeleton motion with Motion Capture systems broadens the landscape of human performance behavioral analysis within Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) settings. To describe the functionalities and stress the potential of the toolkit four specific examples, chosen among relevant literature challenges in the field, are developed using our simulation utils: i) 3D multi-RGB-D camera calibration in simulation, ii) creation of a synthetic human skeleton tracking dataset based on OpenPose, iii) multi-camera scenario for human skeleton tracking in simulation, and iv) a human-robot interaction example. The key of this work is to create a straightforward pipeline which we hope will motivate research on new vision-based algorithms and methodologies for lightweight human-tracking and flexible human-robot applications
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
ErgoTac-Belt: Anticipatory Vibrotactile Feedback to Lead Centre of Pressure during Walking
No full textBalance and gait disorders are the second leading cause of falls, which, along with consequent injuries, are reported as major public health problems all over the world. For patients who do not require mechanical support, vibrotactile feedback interfaces have proven to be a successful approach in restoring balance. Most of the existing strategies assess trunk or head tilt and velocity or plantar forces, and are limited to the analysis of stance. On the other hand, central to balance control is the need to maintain the body's centre of pressure (CoP) within feasible limits of the support polygon (SP), as in standing, or on track to a new SP, as in walking. Hence, this paper proposes an exploratory study to investigate whether vibrotactile feedback can be employed to lead human CoP during walking. The ErgoTac-Belt vibrotactile device is introduced to instruct the users about the direction to take, both in the antero-posterior and medio-lateral axes. An anticipatory strategy is adopted here, to give the users enough time to react to the stimuli. Experiments on ten healthy subjects demonstrated the promising capability of the proposed device to guide the users' CoP along a predefined reference path, with similar performance as the one achieved with visual feedback. Future developments will investigate our strategy and device in guiding the CoP of elderly or individuals with vestibular impairments, who may not be aware of or, able to figure out, a safe and ergonomic CoP path
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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