Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients

Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4-6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 1 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 9 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 11 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 12 Advertisements IEEE

Robotic Grasping of Large Objects for Collaborative Manipulation

In near future, robots are envisioned to work alongside humans in professional and domestic environments without significant restructuring of workspace. Robotic systems in such setups must be adept at observation, analysis and rational decision making. To coexist in an environment, humans and robots will need to interact and cooperate for multiple tasks. A fundamental such task is the manipulation of large objects in work environments which requires cooperation between multiple manipulating agents for load sharing. Collaborative manipulation has been studied in the literature with the focus on multi-agent planning and control strategies. However, for a collaborative manipulation task, grasp planning also plays a pivotal role in cooperation and task completion. In this work, a novel approach is proposed for collaborative grasping and manipulation of large unknown objects. The manipulation task was defined as a sequence of poses and expected external wrench acting on the target object. In a two-agent manipulation task, the proposed approach selects a grasp for the second agent after observing the grasp location of the first agent. The solution is computed in a way that it minimizes the grasp wrenches by load sharing between both agents. To verify the proposed methodology, an online system for human-robot manipulation of unknown objects was developed. The system utilized depth information from a fixed Kinect sensor for perception and decision making for a human-robot collaborative lift-up. Experiments with multiple objects substantiated that the proposed method results in an optimal load sharing despite limited information and partial observability

Collaboration and Virtualization in Large Information Systems Projects

A project is evolving through different phases from idea and conception until the experiments, implementation and maintenance. The globalization, the Internet, the Web and the mobile computing changed many human activities, and in this respect, the realization of the Information System (IS) projects. The projects are growing, the teams are geographically distributed, and the users are heterogeneous. In this respect, the realization of the large Information Technology (IT) projects needs to use collaborative technologies. The distribution of the team, the users' heterogeneity and the project complexity determines the virtualization. This paper is an overview of these aspects for large IT projects. It shortly present a general framework developed by the authors for collaborative systems in general and adapted to collaborative project management. The general considerations are illustrated on the case of a large IT project in which the authors were involved.large IT projects, collaborative systems, virtualization, framework for collaborative virtual systems