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The introduction of technology in the public school teaching process could help increasing the weak motivation we can observe toward engineering studies. To achieve this goal, one main obstacle is motivating public school teachers to use technological tools in their teaching activity. In this paper we present how to use a large public robotic festival to introduce such educational tools to teachers. A survey made among the teachers helps in understanding their expectations in this particular context and the potential impact of this action, giving hints on how to run this type of activity.
Posted on: March 15, 2012
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For four years a robotics festival has taken place at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland. As the number of visitors has rapidly grown from a few thousands to a dozen thousands, it gives an opportunity to investigate who is attending this event and which impact can be obtained in terms of education and motivation toward understanding science and technology. In the 2011 edition of the festival, a large survey was carried out, collecting data from 3423 visitors. The analysis of the collected data gives an idea about the profile of the people attending the event and the key factors impacting the acceptance of science and technology. Findings show that people of all ages and especially children and families have been attracted. More men than women attended the festival and visitors tended to have completed higher education. Overall, people appreciated that the event gave them the opportunity to make themselves a picture of robotics and some teenagers got encouraged to learn more about it. We conclude by presenting our lessons learned and make suggestions to help others with organizing public robotic events.
Posted on: March 15, 2012
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Domestic robots have slowly found their way into some of our homes and onto the shelves of major stores selling technical appliances. Who hasn’t already seen or heard of robots that vacuum or mow the lawn? As researchers in robotics, we feel this growing commercial success is a great opportunity to learn about robot adoption processes. Leaving the marketing buzz and usual fantasies about robot invasions aside, we are curious to find out how robots are perceived by users. Are robots revolutionizing people’s practices at home? Understanding the adoption of such robots is also central, as it helps to pinpoint crucial factors to be taken into account while designing new robots. Other questions we wish to consider include: What convinces people to adopt them? What stops people from adopting them? What features or concepts should be transferred to future robot generations? To answer these questions, we conducted an ethnographic study that analyzed how people adopted or rejected a vacuum-cleaning robot in their homes [1]. We gave a popular commercially available robot (iRobot’s Roomba) to nine households and observed them over a period of six months [2]. We recruited households with and without children, pets, and gardens. We analyzed cleaning habits before Roomba. We then observed how they evolved from the moment we brought them the robot: at installa- tion, after two weeks, and then two and four months after installation.
Posted on: March 15, 2012
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Vibrotactile displays can extend the perception capabilities of visually impaired persons. Placing such devices on the head promises easy attachment and detachment without reducing other interaction abilities. However, the effectiveness of head-attached vibrotactile displays has never been thoroughly tested. This paper presents the results obtained from experiments with 22 subjects equipped with a display containing 12 cointype motors equally-spaced in a horizontal plane around the upper head region. Our display allowed single- as well as multimotor activation with up to six simultaneously active motors. We identified the minimum and comfort strength of vibrotactile stimulation, measured the precision in perceiving the accurate number of active motors as well as the precision in localizing the stimuli on the head. While subjects identified the correct number of active motors in 94% of the cases when presented with only one active motor, this precision dropped to 40% for two, down to 5% for five simultaneously active motors. This strongly suggests to avoid multi-point stimulation even though the precision of localizing a position of a stimulus on the head is barely affected by the number of simultaneously active motors. Localization precision, however, varied significantly with the region of the head suggesting that the most front and most back regions of the head should be avoided if high precision is required.
Posted on: March 14, 2012
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Typical deflection sensors like strain gauges or devices based on optical fibers require physical contact with the deflected substrate during the measurement process. Such contact, however, impacts on the softness of the substrate and may falsify the measurements. In order to overcome this drawback, a novel method of contactless deflection sensing was proposed in a recent work. It was verified that the deflection angle between two planes can be extracted using only a photosensor and a light source bearing a bell-shape angular emission profile. Yet, the range of operation was limited to concave shapes. In this paper, we introduce an alternative configuration of this light-based deflection sensing method to extend its functionality to convex surfaces. Here, a spheroidal mirror bearing a customized profile is introduced above the light source. This mirror redirects part of the emitted light towards the photosensor hindered by the bending surface during convex deflections.We make use of a ray tracing simulation method to design the mirror profiles, which are accurately reproduced in the manufactured prototypes by tuning the fabrication variables of the manufacturing process. Using a shape-sensing prototype, it is verified that the use of the mirror extends the range of detectable deflections by 55deg. to convex bendings, yielding a deviation of only 8.3% from simulated results. Our deflection sensing solution is a promising method to be used as a shape sensor in numerous applications, such as soft robotics platforms or prosthetic devices.
Posted on: March 13, 2012
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Compliant actuation contributes enormously in legged locomotion robotics since it is able to alleviate control efforts in improving the robot’s adaptability and energy efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel design of a variable stiffness rotary actuator, called MESTRAN, which was especially targeted to address the limitations in terms of the amount of energy and time required to vary the stiffness of an actuated joint. We have constructed a mechanical model in simulation and a physical prototype. We conducted a series of experiments to validate the performance of the MESTRAN actuator prototype. The results from the simulation and experiments show that MESTRAN allows independent control of stiffness and position of an actuated rotary joint with a large operational range and high speed. The torque-displacement relationship is close to linear. Lastly, the MESTRAN actuator is energy-efficient since a certain stiffness level is maintained without energy input.
Posted on: March 13, 2012
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Neurological patients with impaired upper limbs often receive arm therapy to restore or relearn lost motor functions. During the last years robotic devices were developed to assist the patient during the training. In daily life the diversity of movements is large because the human arm has many degrees of freedom and is used as a manipulandum to interact with the environment. To support a patient during the training the amount of support should be adapted in an assist-as-needed manner. We propose a method to learn the arm support needed during the training of activities of daily living (ADL) with an arm rehabilitation robot. The model learns the performance of the patient and creates an impairment space with a radial basis function network that can be used to assist the patient together with a patient-cooperative control strategy. Together with the arm robot ARMin the learning algorithm was evaluated. The results showed that the proposed model is able to learn the required arm support for different movements during ADL training. © 2011 IEEE.
Posted on: March 13, 2012
Keywords: adaptation,
adl,
arm,
arm support,
dure,
learn,
movement,
online,
online learn,
patient support,
robot,
robotic,
support,
support dure,
train
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Knee joint impedance varies substantially during physiological gait. Quantifying this modulation is critical for the design of transfemoral prostheses that aim to mimic physiological limb behavior. Conventional methods for quantifying joint impedance typically involve perturbing the joint in a controlled manner, and describing impedance as the dynamic relationship between applied perturbations and corresponding joint torques. These experimental techniques, however, are difficult to apply during locomotion without impeding natural movements. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the elastic component of knee joint impedance that depends on muscle activation, often referred to as active knee stiffness. The method estimates stiffness using a musculoskeletal model of the leg and a model for activation-dependent short-range muscle stiffness. Muscle forces are estimated from measurements including limb kinematics, kinetics and muscle electromyograms. For isometric validation, we compare model estimates to measurements involving joint perturbations; measured stiffness is 17% lower than model estimates for extension, and 42% lower for flexion torques. We show that sensitivity of stiffness estimates to common approaches for estimating muscle force is small in isometric conditions. We also make initial estimates of how knee stiffness is modulated during gait, illustrating how this approach may be used to obtain parameters relevant to the design of transfemoral prostheses. © 2011 IEEE.
Posted on: March 13, 2012
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This work introduces a framework for the creation and analysis of efficient gaits for legged systems based on the exploitation of natural dynamics. It summarizes the theory behind hybrid dynamic modeling, the identification of optimal periodic motions with single shooting and direct collocation, and the analysis of first order stability. Three examples introduce various aspects of gait creation and analysis: a stability study of a passive dynamic walker determines the ideal position of the leg’s center of mass, the cost of transportation is minimized for a prismatic monopod hopper based on series elastic actuators, and a basic controller is created for the model of a bounding robot. The presented tools and examples are freely available at www.asl.ethz.ch/people/cremy/personal/GaitCreation. © 2011 IEEE.
Posted on: March 13, 2012
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We study a distributed approach to path planning. We focus on holonomic kinematic motion in cluttered 2D areas. The problem consists in defining the precise sequence of roto-translations of a rigid object of arbitrary shape that has to be transported from an initial to a final location through a large, cluttered environment. Our planning system is implemented as a swarm of flying robots that are initially deployed in the environment and take static positions at the ceiling. Each robot is equipped with a camera and only sees a portion of the area below. Each robot acts as a local planner: it calculates the part of the path relative to the area it sees, and exchanges information with its neighbors through a wireless connection. This way, the robot swarm realizes a cooperative distributed calculation of the path. The path is communicated to ground robots, which move the object. We introduce a number of strategies to improve the system’s performance in terms of scalability, resource efficiency, and robustness to alignment errors in the robot camera network. We report extensive simulation results that show the validity of our approach, considering a variety of object shapes and environments. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Posted on: March 13, 2012
