Robot Jenga: Autonomous and Strategic Block Extraction

© 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper describes our successful implementation of a robot that autonomously and strategically removes multiple blocks from an unstable Jenga tower. We present an integrated strategy for perception, planning and control that achieves repeatable performance in this challenging physical domain. In contrast to previous implementations, we rely only on low-cost, readily available system components and use strategic algorithms to resolve system uncertainty. We present a three-stage planner for block extraction which considers block selection, extraction order, and physics-based simulation that evaluates removability. Existing vision techniques are combined in a novel sequence for the identification and tracking of blocks within the tower. Discussion of our approach is presented following experimental results on a 5-DOF robot manipulator

Modelado de sensores piezoresistivos y uso de una interfaz basada en guantes de datos para el control de impedancia de manipuladores robóticos

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Físicas, Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automática, leída el 21-02-2014Sección Deptal. de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automática (Físicas)Fac. de Ciencias FísicasTRUEunpu

An investigation of effects of the partial active assistance in a virtual environment based rehabilitation system

This thesis describes a study on a new active assistance in robotic rehabilitation in a haptic virtual environment for post-stroke patients. The novelty of this active assistance system lies in that the assistance is directly rendered on the result of a task performing. Active assistance will generally raise the confidence level of patients in performing a rehabilitation exercise. However, an overly high assistance level may induce cognitive fatigue with patients and thus decreases their motivation of performing a rehabilitation exercise. This thesis hypothesizes that a proper active assistance can improve the performance of a rehabilitation exercise, but will not reduce the motivation of patients in doing rehabilitation exercise. However, due to the difficulty in obtaining a proper number of patients for the experiment, the study turned to healthy people. Accordingly, a revised hypothesis is that active assistance on healthy people does not improve the task performance and not reduces the motivation of healthy people. In this thesis, first, a test-bed with the haptic virtual environment was designed and constructed. The test-bed included a simple task – i.e., following a predefined circle trajectory. Then, a statistical experiment was designed and an experiment was conducted on the test-bed. The experimental results test the hypothesis successfully. The main contributions of this thesis are: (1) the development of a new active assistance system for rehabilitation in a virtual environment and (2) the experimental study on the motivation of healthy people with the developed active assistance system. A care must, however, be taken that the experiment was conducted on healthy people and the conclusion drawn from the study may not be valid on patients

Merging Local and Global 3D Perception for Robotic Grasping and Manipulation

This paper presents our results towards fusing RGB-D images with data from contact and proximity sensors embedded in a robotic hand for improved object perception, recognition and manipulation. Optical depth information from multiple sensors is often inaccurate and inconsistent. These problems arise from problems with sensor calibration, but also occlusion of objects by other objects or the robot arm itself. In this paper, we propose to combine global pose information from RGB-D sensing with local proximity sensing during approach. Here, we use contact information based on a novel contact sensor and additional pose information provided by the arm's pose

Experience based action planning for environmental manipulation in autonomous robotic systems

The ability for autonomous robots to plan action sequences in order to manipulate their environment to achieve a specific goal is of vital importance for agents which are deployed in a vast number of situations. From domestic care robots to autonomous swarms of search and rescue robots there is a need for agents to be able to study, reason about, and manipulate their environment without the oversight of human operators. As these robots are typically deployed in areas inhabited and organised by humans it is likely that they will encounter similar objects when going about their duties, and in many cases the objects encountered are likely to be arranged in similar ways relative to one another. Manipulation of the environment is an incredibly complex task requiring vast amounts of computation to generate a suitable state of actions for even the simplest of tasks. To this end we explore the application of memory based systems to environment manipulation planning. We propose new search techniques targeted at the problem of environmental manipulation for search and rescue, and recall techniques aimed at allowing more complex planning to take place with lower computational cost. We explore these ideas from the perspective of autonomous robotic systems deployed for search and rescue, however the techniques presented would be equally valid for robots in other areas, or for virtual agents interacting with cyber-physical systems

A Unified Visual-Haptic Fingertip Sensor For Advanced Robot Dexterity

The problem of robotic grasping and manipulation requires a system level perspective that needs to be aimed at solving the interlinked sub-problems simultaneously. These sub-problems consists of designing an appropriate robot hand, sensing technology, control, and planning strategy, that can increase the dexterity of a robot hand in complex environments. Approaches towards these lack the proper use and integration of tactile feedback that can potentially enable robot hands with far superior capabilities than found today. This thesis addresses this challenge from three aspects: hardware design, system integration, and algorithm development. On the hardware side, it traces the thorough development of a multi and cross-modal tactile sensor that can measure proximity, contact, and force (PCF). Three unique features of the PCF sensor are (i) the ability to measure visual as well as tactile object features, (ii) its low manufacturing cost and (iii) that it can be easily integrated into different type of robot hands. This is achieved by embedding infrared proximity sensing integrated chips in soft elastomer to achieve a multitude of signals. On the system integration side, the thesis manifests the individual importance of the hand design, visual and tactile sensing modalities in the context of robotic manipulation related tasks through careful real-world robotic experiments. On the algorithmic side, it shows the implementation of several algorithms concerning signal processing, computer vision, controls, probabilistic theory and machine learning for experimental evaluation.</p

The available means of imagination : personal narrative, public rhetoric, and circulation.

This dissertation examines the digital circulation of personal narratives by non-celebrity individuals that become part of larger public and political debates. I posit the “available means of imagination” to describe the ways that narratives – cultural, fictional, and personal – influence our ability to understand the many facets of a given public debate before tracing the interactions among narrative, emotion, and circulation in a series of case studies using new materialist methods. I argue that emotion plays a key role in structures of participation of social media and in how we subsequently engage with contemporary political issues, especially with regards to what we choose to circulate. The dissertation is divided into five chapters, including three case studies. Chapter 1 offers an overview of rhetorical approaches to the public debate, circulation – digital or otherwise – and narrative. The second chapter, which covers Liza Long’s article “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” establishes the relationship between emotion and circulation, arguing that Long’s post traveled widely because of the wide range of emotions it evoked. Chapter 3 analyzes the circulation of the story of Savannah Dietrich, a teenage sexual assault victim who violated a court order by posting the names of her underage attackers on Twitter, via its uptake into preexisting ideologics, demonstrating the ways rhetors may adapt another’s personal narrative to serve as evidence of their own claims while also having their own interpretations of the story mitigated by their worldviews. Chapter 4 examines the case of GamerGate, a movement purportedly devoted to ethics in games journalism which began with programmer Eron Gjoni’s blog post about his relationship and break-up with game designer Zoe Quinn. This case provides further insights into how a personal narrative may be interpreted to fit a preexisting world view, as well as demonstrating how competing narratives develop surrounding the same event, including accounts of the motivations of participants, critiques of opponents, and moves to bolster the ethos of the group with which the rhetor identifies

Running amok : the diary of an hysteric : business education, the self, & other oxymorons : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

This thesis is a work of fiction and falls under the genre of hysterical realism. Hysterical realism seeks to subvert, disrupt, and resist the status quo by blending actual events with absurdist fiction. I am, therefore, making a conscious decision to write differently – and not present my doctoral thesis in the normal, accepted manner. The book that follows is presented as a reflective journal, an exercise in narrative therapy, being read to a therapist. The purpose of these diaries, or chapters, is to shine a spotlight directly on what I perceive are serious deficiencies within business education and, in particular, the MBA. I have constructed this narrative in the only way I know: using humour, integrating popular culture, and providing my own unique take on the world. And, yes, I am writing as the hysteric. I have done this, not because I am a fanboy of Lacan, but because I don’t actually have a choice - the truth is: I am the hysteric. Within this text, the narrator will meet and converse with a number of individuals. These minor characters should be read for what they are: twisted versions of me. They are Lacanian mirrors, placed at intervals, in which I pause to see if I can glimpse some shadow of truth/Self in the dysmorphic reflections. The story begins, is punctuated at intervals by, and ends with conversations between the narrator (me) and his therapist (myself). These have been included to provide a mirror (the analyst’s discourse) for his hysterical discourse. This allows me to view myself as a text (a mirror through which I can better understand not only business education but the Self). I have also included numerous footnotes, which also operate as a mirror (the discourse of the university), providing the requisite, and inescapable, academic ballast that keeps this thesis afloat. It is through considering these various looking glasses and smashing each in turn, that I hope to see the real reflected back in the multitude of sharp splinters that will, through the construction of this book, be reassembled into a far more palatable whole

Force of habit the mystical foundations of the narcotic

This thesis aims to investigate and deconstruct the relationship between the narcotic, its narrative, and western modernity. To reveal the relationship, this thesis argues that it is possible to understand the philosophical, political, cultural and ethical dimensions of western modernity through the ulterior lens of the narcotic. As such, this thesis investigates western modernity's relationship to (a) cocaine as a specific narcotic, and (b) the concept of the narcotic with all its attendant connotations of addictions, illegitimacy, transgression, illegality, and so on. Accordingly, the thesis is both interpretive of the historical narrative of the narcotic of cocaine, and generative in its deconstruction of the relationship between western modernity and the concept of the narcotic. The deconstruction of this relationship ultimately reveals both prior narratives not as oppositional, but as supplementary. This has radical consequences for the manner in which we engage with narcotic use and the user - if the narcotic is supplement to the logic of western modernity, at each attempt to expel the use and user of the narcotic, rather then create difference, we self implicate ourselves in that expulsion and distance. To seek a new and more just means of dealing with the concept of the narcotic, and its use, therefore requires a new epistemological framework which can at once contemplate both narratives at the same time. To this end, the thesis suggests the use of critical complexity theory as one such methodological tool, if supplemented by the thoughts and strategies of Derridian deconstruction and Foucauldian discourse analysis