T.A.C: Augmented Reality System for Collaborative Tele-Assistance in the Field of Maintenance through Internet.

ISBN: 978-1-60558-825-4International audienceIn this paper we shall present the T.A.C. (Télé-Assistance-Collaborative) system whose aim is to combine remote collaboration and industrial maintenance. T.A.C. enables the copresence of parties within the framework of a supervised maintenance task to be remotely "simulated" thanks to augmented reality (AR) and audio-video communication. To support such cooperation, we propose a simple way of interacting through our O.A.P. paradigm and AR goggles specially developed for the occasion. The handling of 3D items to reproduce gestures and an additional knowledge management tool (e-portfolio, feedback, etc) also enables this solution to satisfy the new needs of industry

Experimentation of a New TeleAssistance System Using Augmented Reality

ISBN : 2-9515730-9-XInternational audienceT.A.C system was built in order to propose a new mode of remote communication. When somebody needs to be assisted on a manual task, classical technical support methods such as phone or visioconference rapidly show their limits in terms of human interaction. By allowing a distant expert to see exactly what an operator is seeing, he could interact with him in interactive time thanks to augmented reality via an adequate interaction paradigm named "Picking Outlining Adding". By "simulating" co-presence of the expert close to the operator through visual guidance information, ambiguity of language and difficulty of communication are avoided, and operations are easily performed. Scientific experimentation we have conducted and we describe in this article shows the teaching interest and the efficiency of this new mode of communication. The operator learns and operates more rapidly, in complete serenity, increasing reliability of his tasks. Moreover, throughout this paper, we show that the developed principles are sufficiently general to be applied to other use cases of tele-assistance that go beyond the originally planned industrial maintenance

Experimentation of a New TeleAssistance System Using Augmented Reality

ISBN : 2-9515730-9-XInternational audienceT.A.C system was built in order to propose a new mode of remote communication. When somebody needs to be assisted on a manual task, classical technical support methods such as phone or visioconference rapidly show their limits in terms of human interaction. By allowing a distant expert to see exactly what an operator is seeing, he could interact with him in interactive time thanks to augmented reality via an adequate interaction paradigm named "Picking Outlining Adding". By "simulating" co-presence of the expert close to the operator through visual guidance information, ambiguity of language and difficulty of communication are avoided, and operations are easily performed. Scientific experimentation we have conducted and we describe in this article shows the teaching interest and the efficiency of this new mode of communication. The operator learns and operates more rapidly, in complete serenity, increasing reliability of his tasks. Moreover, throughout this paper, we show that the developed principles are sufficiently general to be applied to other use cases of tele-assistance that go beyond the originally planned industrial maintenance

Context Network

Context network is the result of the integration of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and context-awareness which are primarily reconsidered in terms of granular computing. It is aimed to be reliable infrastructure for providing applicable and proper contextual information necessary for developing realistic context-aware applications

ENHANCED SENSOR NETWORK : A SPECIALIZED INFRASTRUCTURE FOR CONTEXT-AWARE APPLICATIONS

Respecting the mobile world, it is about the time to demand for systems to fully take advantage of their environment. In this way, Enhanced Sensor Network is another step toward developing realistic context-aware applications, which is based on the basic infrastructures provided by wireless sensor networks (WSN) and context-aware application development paradigms. In this paper we introduce a framework for integrating WSNs with context-aware application requirements to enhance wireless sensor network as an infrastructure which can provide necessary contextual information for context-aware applications

Designs for a general purpose wearable computer

To provide input and control, wearable computer solutions must replace the familiar desktop interface devices of keyboard and mouse with specialized hardware. While successful wearable input solutions have been developed for domain specific applications, a standard input interface for general purpose wearable computing has yet to emerge. The steep learning curves and unruly hardware of the solutions proposed thus far are one of the factors keeping wearable computing out of the mainstream. This thesis proposes a new input and control approach that increases wearable computing usability by integrating several commonly available devices into a comprehensive system. The proposed system integrates commercial, off the shelf hardware together with generalized software applications that increase the usability and general utility of a wearable computer. The hardware consists of a wearable computer, a clip-on microdisplay eyepiece and a standard PDA running Pocket PC. Through a Bluetooth network, the PDA can wirelessly control the text input (keyboard) and pointer control (mouse) of the wearable computer. The software consists of two applications designed to provide easy access to new content and previously stored data. One application presents a user with a continuous scroll of new content which can be attended to at the user\u27s discretion. The content is dynamically retrieved from any online sources, and can range from news feeds and stock quotes to calendars and weather reports. New content can be added to the user\u27s persistent digital store at any time. The second application, a private peer-to-peer data sharing program called the Tangle, was developed to fuse the user\u27s multiple data sources (home or work computer, wearable computer, PDA) into a single, searchable repository. Tangle also provides easy access to the digital assets of other, trusted Tangle users. Tangle makes it easy for virtually any content that a user encounters while using the system to be easily added to the user\u27s persistent data store

Monitoring food quality using sensor technology from harvest to home

A food quality sensor is a device that responds to some property associated with food quality and transforms the response into a signal (1). This signal may provide direct information about the quality factor to be measured or may have a known relationship to the quality factor. On-line food quality sensors operate directly in the process stream, giving a real-time signal that relates to the quality factor in question. Therefore, an online sensor has the advantage of giving an immediate measurement allowing processes to be adjusted if necessary (1). This thesis is based on 3 projects describing the design and development of on-line food quality sensor systems for specific food applications as`outlined below: Project 1: Development of an autonomous, wireless pH and temperature sensing system for monitoring pig meat quality. Project 2: Development of a web-based wireless temperature sensing system for the fishing industry. Project 3: Development of on-package sensors to detect shellfish. Projects 1 & 2 describe pH and temperature sensors which are coupled with wireless communications to create autonomous, wireless sensing devices capable of delivering data in real-time to a remote PC where the data can be analysed or automatically uploaded onto the internet via specifically designed web-enabled software. Project 3 focuses on the development of pH sensitive polymer membranes that change colour in response to spoilage volatiles released by shellfish packed in sealed containers. Field trials performed with the aid of Irish food industries and collaborating Irish research institutes played a major role in obtaining the results for each of the mentioned projects. These include the Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences, University College Cork; Galtee Meats, Mitchelstown, Co. Cork; Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM) coastal staff and Errigal Iasc, Carrick, Co. Donegal. The following thesis gives a detailed account of the recent challenges faced by the Irish food sector including the detection of poor quality pig meat, traceability and temperature control within the fishing industry and methods to evaluate seafood spoilage. The research activities carried out to overcome such challenges are discussed including the potential impact on the Irish food industry

Context-awareness for adaptive information retrieval systems

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDThis research study investigates optimization of IRS to individual information needs in order of relevance. The research addressed development of algorithms that optimize the ranking of documents retrieved from IRS. In this thesis, we present two aspects of context-awareness in IR. Firstly, the design of context of information. The context of a query determines retrieved information relevance. Thus, executing the same query in diverse contexts often leads to diverse result rankings. Secondly, the relevant context aspects should be incorporated in a way that supports the knowledge domain representing users’ interests. In this thesis, the use of evolutionary algorithms is incorporated to improve the effectiveness of IRS. A context-based information retrieval system is developed whose retrieval effectiveness is evaluated using precision and recall metrics. The results demonstrate how to use attributes from user interaction behaviour to improve the IR effectivenes