1,354,184 research outputs found
T.P.T. a novel Taekwondo personal trainer robot
No full textIn recent years, robotics has been widely used in the sport sector, but few examples of robotic platforms are currently used in combat sports. This work presents T.P.T., a novel robotic prototype used in the context of Taekwondo, an Olympic martial art sport, able of interacting with children and with adult athletes. In this paper, the conceptual and functional design of the robot, including some preliminary tests aimed at its calibration, is described in details. The robot has been presented at the 2013 Italian Championship of Taekwondo, and it is in a patent pending status (Muscolo and Recchiuto, 2013)
Filo diretto con l'università. Spazio in movimento, a cura di Paolo Ferrari
No full textIl progetto pubblicato è il risultato dell'attività di ricerca svolta in qualità di Coordinatore presso il Laboratorio di Sintesi Finale in Architetura degli Interni al Politecnico di Bari. La ricerca è volta ad approfondore i caratteri di "marinità" nella nautica contemporanea attrevso un uso innovativo dei rivestimenti lignnei su scocche in vetroresina, anche per gli esterni. La tesi inoltre approfondisce una diversa ed innovativa distribuzione degli elementi di areddo per la zona notte. Gli studenti del Laboratorio sono F. Pascale, R. Pedone, D. Putignano, A. Recchiuto, A. Tatulli, s. Zaccaro
A Feasibility Study of Culture-Aware Cloud Services for Conversational Robots
No full textCultural competence - i.e., the capability to adapt verbal and non-verbal interaction to the user's cultural background - may be a key element for social robots to increase the user experience. However, designing and implementing culturally competent social robots is a complex task, given that advanced conversational skills are required. In this context, Cloud services may be useful for helping robots in generating appropriate interaction patterns in a culture-aware manner. In this letter, we present the design and the implementation of the CARESSES Cloud, a set of robotic services aimed at endowing robots with cultural competence in verbal interaction. A preliminary evaluation of the Cloud services as a general dialoguing system for culture-aware social robots has been performed, analyzing the feasibility of the architecture in terms of communication and data processing delays
A GAN-based Approach for Generating Culture-Aware Co-Speech Gestures
No full textEmbedding social robots with the capability of accompanying their sentences with natural gestures may be the key to increasing their acceptability and their usage in real contexts. However, it could be argued that the definition of natural communicative gestures is not trivial, since it strictly depends on the culture of the person interacting with the robot. The proposed work investigates the usage of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for generating culture-dependent communicative gestures based on speech audio features. To this aim, a custom dataset, only composed of persons belonging to the same culture, has been created, to extract all keypoints and audio features needed to train the network. Then, a generative model, also consisting of a voice conversion module, has been implemented and tested with the humanoid robot Pepper. Preliminary results, obtained through objective measurements and subjective evaluation, show that the proposed approach may be promising for generating culture-dependent communicative gestures for social robots
Personality- and Memory-Based Software Framework for Human-Robot Interaction
No full textThe synergic orchestration of the cognitive and psychological dimensions characterizes human intelligence. Accordingly, carefully designing this mechanism in artificial intelligence can be a successful strategy to increase human likeness in a robot, enhancing mutual understanding and building a more natural and intuitive interaction. For this purpose, the main contribution of this work is a psychological and cognitive architecture tailored for HRI based on the interplay between robotic personality and memory-based cognitive processes. Indeed, the artificial personality manifests itself not only in various aspects of the behavior but also within the action selection process, which is closely intertwined with personality-dependent hedonic experiences linked to memories. Within this paper, we propose a task- and platform-independent framework, evaluated in a multiparty collaborative scenario. Obtained results show that a robot connected to our proposed framework is perceived as a cognitive agent capable of manifesting perceivable and distinguishable personality traits
Usability evaluation with different viewpoints of a Human-Swarm interface for UAVs control in formation
No full textA common way to organize a high number of robots, both when moving autonomously and when controlled by a human operator, is to let them move in formation. This is a principle that takes inspiration from the nature, that maximizes the possibility of monitoring the environment and therefore of anticipating risks and finding targets. In robotics, alongside these reasons, the organization of a robot team in a formation allows a human operator to deal with a high number of agents in a simpler way, moving the swarm as a single entity. In this context, the typology of visual feedback is fundamental for a correct situational awareness, but in common practice having an optimal camera configuration is not always possible. Usually human operators use cameras on board the multirotors, with an egocentric point of view, while it is known that in mobile robotics overall awareness and pattern recognition are optimized by exocentric views. In this article we present an analysis of the performance achieved by human operators controlling a swarm of UAVs in formation, accomplishing different tasks and using different point of views. The control architecture is implemented in a ROS framework and interfaced with a 3D simulation environment. Experimental tests show a degradation of performance while using egocentric cameras with respect of an exocentric point of view, although cameras on board the robots allow to satisfactorily accomplish simple tasks
Social Drone Sharing to Increase the UAV Patrolling Autonomy in Emergency Scenarios
No full textUnmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) popularity is increased in recent years, and the domain of application of this new technology is continuously expanding. However, although UAVs may be extremely useful in monitoring contexts, the operational aspects of drone patrolling services have not yet been extensively studied. Specifically, patrolling and inspecting with UAVs different targets distributed over a large area is still an open problem, due to battery constraints and other practical limitations. In this work, we propose a deterministic algorithm for patrolling large areas in a pre- or post-critical event scenario. The autonomy range of UAVs is extended with the concept of Social Drone Sharing: citizens may offer their availability to take care of the UAV if it lands in their private area, being thus strictly involved in the monitoring process. The proposed approach aims at finding optimal routes in this context, minimizing the patrolling time and respecting the battery constraints. Simulation experiments have been conducted, giving some insights about the performance of the proposed method.https://youtu.be/earF7Dkwbv
Robot-Induced Group Conversation Dynamics: A Model to Balance Participation and Unify Communities
No full textThe purpose of this research is to study the impact of robot participation in group conversations and assess the effectiveness of different addressing policies. The study involved a total of 300 participants, who were divided into groups of four and engaged in a dialogue with a humanoid robot. The robot acted as a moderator, using information obtained during the conversation to determine which speaker to address. The study found that the policy used by the robot significantly impacted the conversation dynamics. Specifically, the robot provided more balanced attention to each participant and reduced the number of subgroups
Ethical concerns in rescue robotics: a scoping review
No full textRescue operations taking place in disaster settings can be fraught with ethical challenges. Further ethical challenges will likely be introduced by the use of robots, which are expected to soon become commonplace in search and rescue missions and disaster recovery efforts. To help focus timely reflection on the ethical considerations associated with the deployment of rescue robots, we have conducted a scoping review exploring the relevant academic literature following a widely recognized scoping review framework. Of the 429 papers identified by the first screening, six fulfilled the selection criteria of our literature review. Quantitative data synthesis showed that a subset of the papers includes a qualitative experimental exploration of the ethical issues at hand, with workshops involving both experts and potential users. Most use simulations or scenarios to anticipate the ethical implications and other consequences of using robots in search and rescue missions. Qualitative text analysis identified seven core ethically relevant themes: fairness and discrimination; false or excessive expectations; labor replacement; privacy; responsibility; safety; trust. Our results suggest that the literature on ethics in rescue robotics is scant and disparate, but the papers identified uniformly endorsed a proactive approach to handling the ethical concerns associated with the use of robots in disaster scenarios
Visual feedback with multiple cameras in a UAVs Human-Swarm Interface
No full textIn all situations in which a wide area has to be monitored, a practice emerging in recent years consists in using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and in particular multirotors. Even if many steps forward have been taken toward the fully autonomous control of UAVs, a human pilot is usually in charge of controlling the robots. However, teleoperating UAVs can become a hard task whenever it is necessary to deploy a swarm of robots instead of a single unit, to the end of increasing the area under observation. In this case, the organization of robots in a structured formation may reduce the effort of the operator to control the swarm. When controlling a team of robots, the typology of visual feedback is crucial. It is known that, while overall awareness and pattern recognition are optimized by exocentric views, i.e., with cameras from above the swarm, the immediate environment is often better viewed egocentrically, i.e., with cameras on board the robots. In this article we present the implementation of a human-robot interface for the control of a swarm of UAVs, with a focus on the analysis of the effects of different visual feedbacks on the performance of human operators
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