1,721,089 research outputs found

    System Approach: A paradigm for Robotic Tactile Sensing

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    In the pursuit of developing touch sensors or tactile sensing arrays, the emphasis has only been on the sensors. This led to a large number of ‘bench top’ sensors, very few of which have actually been used in robotic systems. And those that have seen the actual use have almost invariably been used in static contact point imaging rather than the active manipulation or exploration. Perhaps the lack of the system approach rendered many of them unusable. In this work, we present the design of a tactile sensing system taking into account not only the parameters to be sensed but also the physical and operational constraints of robotic system

    Blink-Sync: Mediating Human-Robot Social Dynamics with Naturalistic Blinking Behavior

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    This short paper discusses the utilization of naturalistic eye blinking behavior in social robotics and gives an overview of the application possibilities. It proposes an integrative blinking model and gives an outlook on its implementation

    Understanding mirror neurons: a bio-robotic approach

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    This paper reports about our investigation on action understanding in the brain. We review recent results of the neurophysiology of the mirror system in the monkey. Based on these observations we propose a model of this brain system which is responsible for action recognition. The link between object affordances and action understanding is considered. To support our hypothesis we describe two experiments where some aspects of the model have been implemented. In the first experiment an action recognition system is trained by using data recorded from human movements. In the second experiment, the model is partially implemented on a humanoid robot which learns to mimic simple actions performed by a human subject on different objects. These experiments show that motor information can have a significant role in action interpretation and that a mirror-like representation can be developed autonomously as a result of the interaction between an individual and the environment

    Incremental semiparametric inverse dynamics learning

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    This paper presents a novel approach for incremental semiparametric inverse dynamics learning. In particular, we consider the mixture of two approaches: Parametric modeling based on rigid body dynamics equations and nonparametric modeling based on incremental kernel methods, with no prior information on the mechanical properties of the system. The result is an incremental semiparametric approach, leveraging the advantages of both the parametric and nonparametric models. We validate the proposed technique learning the dynamics of one arm of the iCub humanoid robot

    Relevance-weighted-reconstruction of articulatory features in deep-neural-network-based acoustic-to-articulatory mapping

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    We present a strategy for learning Deep-Neural-Network (DNN)-based Acoustic-to-Articulatory Mapping (AAM) functions where the contribution of an articulatory feature (AF) to the global reconstruction error is weighted by its relevance. We first empirically show that when an articulator is more crucial for the production of a given phone it is less variable, confirming previous findings. We then compute the relevance of an articulatory feature as a function of its frame-wise variance dependent on the acoustic evidence which is estimated through a Mixture Density Network (MDN). Finally we combine acoustic and recovered articulatory features in a hybrid DNN-HMM phone recognizer. Tested on the MOCHA-TIMIT corpus, articulatory features reconstructed by a standardly trained DNN lead to a 8.4% relative phone error reduction (w.r.t. a recognizer that only uses MFCCs), whereas when the articulatory features are reconstructed taking into account their relevance the relative phone error reduction increased to 10.9
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