1,720,956 research outputs found
Mixed Reality: an Efficient Communication Channel for Human-Robot Collaboration
No full textCollaborative robots represent a technological leap forward, and their adoption could benefit many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Such robots are cost-effective and allow humans for safe, close-proximity, and highly flexible interactions with the machine. Nonetheless, industrial collaborative robots nowadays lack a key requirement for efficient collaboration, namely the possibility to effectively communicate with human teammates. To tackle this open and challenging aspect in collaborative robotics, the present Ph.D. work has drawn inspiration from social studies on human-human collaboration, where other researchers have demonstrated how efficient interaction is achieved through implicit communication, made up of a series of cues (e.g., gaze, gestures, etc.), which lead individuals to convey their own intentions and infer their teammate’s ones dynamically.
Building on this principle, this Ph.D. project’s objective has been attempting to bridge such a communication gap by developing novel interfaces to enable a more intuitive, seamless interaction between humans and robots and to endow the latter with the ability to project their intentions, defined as upcoming planned actions, in a straightforward way.
To achieve such a result, various communication alternatives have been evaluated and eventually Mixed Reality has been chosen and thoroughly explored as a suitable channel for building an efficient and intuitive human-robot communication layer. To this extent, a novel robot system architecture has been developed and refined throughout the three years, integrating Mixed Reality with modern and powerful Head-Mounted Display devices. Such architecture brings forth a comprehensive bi-directional, holographic communication interface which can be employed in various collaborative scenarios.
On the one hand, robot-to-human communication enables projecting robot’s intentions as holographic, visual cues in a direct way to the human teammate. Specifically, a virtual counterpart of the robot can be superimposed to the real one in the Mixed Reality layer and used to anticipate upcoming robot’s actions via dynamic, holographic animations, potentially offering useful insights and improving human teammate’s awareness throughout the collaborative process. The proposed interface has been tested in multiple user studies under different collaborative contexts, including assembly tasks with fixed robot manipulators and scenarios of mobile collaboration. The results have highlighted that such form of holographic communication ensures a smoother collaboration process, where human and robot are less likely to obstruct and hinder each other, due to the improved awareness of the human, while at the same time increasing the rate of success of joint actions (e.g., handovers).
On the other hand, human-to-robot communication can be used to ensure a more direct interaction and to easily control and teach tasks to the robotic teammate. In particular, by interacting with the holographic robot in the Mixed Reality layer through a combination of voice and gestures, the human teammate can intuitively achieve Kinesthetic Teaching and teach both simple motions and complex pick-and-place or handover tasks to the robot.
Overall, the result of this Ph.D. work is an open-source, modular architecture which can be employed by other researchers and companies to take advantage of the proposed holographic communication scheme, both in industrial collaborative contexts and in more social scenarios of human-robot interaction
Mixed Reality as Communication Medium for Human-Robot Collaboration
No full textHumans engaged in collaborative activities are naturally able to convey their intentions to teammates through multi-modal communication, which is made up of explicit and implicit cues. Similarly, a more natural form of human-robot collaboration may be achieved by enabling robots to convey their intentions to human teammates via multiple communication channels. In this paper, we postulate that a better communication may take place should collaborative robots be able to anticipate their movements to human teammates in an intuitive way. In order to support such a claim, we propose a robot system's architecture through which robots can communicate planned motions to human teammates leveraging a Mixed Reality interface powered by modern head-mounted displays. Specifically, the robot's hologram, which is superimposed to the real robot in the human teammate's point of view, shows the robot's future movements, allowing the human to understand them in advance, and possibly react to them in an appropriate way. We conduct a preliminary user study to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed anticipatory visualization during a complex collaborative task. The experimental results suggest that an improved and more natural collaboration can be achieved by employing this anticipatory communication mode
RICO-MR: An Open-Source Architecture for Robot Intent Communication through Mixed Reality
No full textThis article presents an open-source architecture for conveying robots' intentions to human teammates using Mixed Reality and Head-Mounted Displays. The architecture has been developed focusing on its modularity and re-usability aspects. Both binaries and source code are available, enabling researchers and companies to adopt the proposed architecture as a standalone solution or to integrate it in more comprehensive implementations. Due to its scalability, the proposed architecture can be easily employed to develop shared Mixed Reality experiences involving multiple robots and human teammates in complex collaborative scenarios
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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe 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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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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