Robotics 2010

Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development

Soft Robotics: Design for Simplicity, Performance, and Robustness of Robots for Interaction with Humans.

This thesis deals with the design possibilities concerning the next generation of advanced Robots. Aim of the work is to study, analyse and realise artificial systems that are essentially simple, performing and robust and can live and coexist with humans. The main design guideline followed in doing so is the Soft Robotics Approach, that implies the design of systems with intrinsic mechanical compliance in their architecture. The first part of the thesis addresses design of new soft robotics actuators, or robotic muscles. At the beginning are provided information about what a robotic muscle is and what is needed to realise it. A possible classification of these systems is analysed and some criteria useful for their comparison are explained. After, a set of functional specifications and parameters is identified and defined, to characterise a specific subset of this kind of actuators, called Variable Stiffness Actuators. The selected parameters converge in a data-sheet that easily defines performance and abilities of the robotic system. A complete strategy for the design and realisation of this kind of system is provided, which takes into account their me- chanical morphology and architecture. As consequence of this, some new actuators are developed, validated and employed in the execution of complex experimental tasks. In particular the actuator VSA-Cube and its add-on, a Variable Damper, are developed as the main com- ponents of a robotics low-cost platform, called VSA-CubeBot, that v can be used as an exploratory platform for multi degrees of freedom experiments. Experimental validations and mathematical models of the system employed in multi degrees of freedom tasks (bimanual as- sembly and drawing on an uneven surface), are reported. The second part of the thesis is about the design of multi fingered hands for robots. In this part of the work the Pisa-IIT SoftHand is introduced. It is a novel robot hand prototype designed with the purpose of being as easily usable, robust and simple as an industrial gripper, while exhibiting a level of grasping versatility and an aspect comparable to that of the human hand. In the thesis the main theo- retical tool used to enable such simplification, i.e. the neuroscience– based notion of soft synergies, are briefly reviewed. The approach proposed rests on ideas coming from underactuated hand design. A synthesis method to realize a desired set of soft synergies through the principled design of adaptive underactuated mechanisms, which is called the method of adaptive synergies, is discussed. This ap- proach leads to the design of hands accommodating in principle an arbitrary number of soft synergies, as demonstrated in grasping and manipulation simulations and experiments with a prototype. As a particular instance of application of the method of adaptive syner- gies, the Pisa–IIT SoftHand is then described in detail. The design and implementation of the prototype hand are shown and its effec- tiveness demonstrated through grasping experiments. Finally, control of the Pisa/IIT Hand is considered. Few different control strategies are adopted, including an experimental setup with the use of surface Electromyographic signals

Advances in Human-Robot Interaction

Rapid advances in the field of robotics have made it possible to use robots not just in industrial automation but also in entertainment, rehabilitation, and home service. Since robots will likely affect many aspects of human existence, fundamental questions of human-robot interaction must be formulated and, if at all possible, resolved. Some of these questions are addressed in this collection of papers by leading HRI researchers

From locomotion to cognition: Bridging the gap between reactive and cognitive behavior in a quadruped robot

The cognitivistic paradigm, which states that cognition is a result of computation with symbols that represent the world, has been challenged by many. The opponents have primarily criticized the detachment from direct interaction with the world and pointed to some fundamental problems (for instance the symbol grounding problem). Instead, they emphasized the constitutive role of embodied interaction with the environment. This has motivated the advancement of synthetic methodologies: the phenomenon of interest (cognition) can be studied by building and investigating whole brain-body-environment systems. Our work is centered around a compliant quadruped robot equipped with a multimodal sensory set. In a series of case studies, we investigate the structure of the sensorimotor space that the application of different actions in different environments by the robot brings about. Then, we study how the agent can autonomously abstract the regularities that are induced by the different conditions and use them to improve its behavior. The agent is engaged in path integration, terrain discrimination and gait adaptation, and moving target following tasks. The nature of the tasks forces the robot to leave the ``here-and-now'' time scale of simple reactive stimulus-response behaviors and to learn from its experience, thus creating a ``minimally cognitive'' setting. Solutions to these problems are developed by the agent in a bottom-up fashion. The complete scenarios are then used to illuminate the concepts that are believed to lie at the basis of cognition: sensorimotor contingencies, body schema, and forward internal models. Finally, we discuss how the presented solutions are relevant for applications in robotics, in particular in the area of autonomous model acquisition and adaptation, and, in mobile robots, in dead reckoning and traversability detection

Actor & Avatar: A Scientific and Artistic Catalog

What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of "technical others" and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material

The Architecture of Soft Machines

This thesis speculates about the possibility of softening architecture through machines. In deviating from traditional mechanical conceptions of machines based on autonomous, functional and purely operational notions, the thesis proposes to conceive of machines as corporeal media in co-constituting relationships with human bodies. As machines become corporeal (robots) and human bodies take on qualities of machines (cyborgs) the thesis investigates their relations to architecture through readings of William S. Burroughs’ proto-cyborgian novel The Soft Machine (1961) and Georges Teyssot’s essay ‘Hybrid Architecture: An Environment for the Prosthetic Body’ (2005) arguing for a revision of architecture’s anthropocentric mandate in favour of technologically co-constituting body ideas. The conceptual shift in man-machine relations is also demonstrated by discussion of two installations shown at the Venice Biennale, Daniel Libeskind’s mechanical Three Lessons in Architecture (1985) and Philip Beesely’s responsive Hylozoic Ground (2010). As the purely mechanical model has been superseded by a model that incorporates digital sensing and embedded actuation, as well as soft and compliant materiality, the promise of softer, more sensitive and corporeal conceptions of technology shines onto architecture. Following Nicholas Negroponte’s ambition for a ‘humanism through machines,’ stated in his groundbreaking work, Soft Architecture Machines (1975), and inspired by recent developments in the emerging field of soft robotics, I have developed a series of practical design experiments, ranging from soft mechanical hybrids to soft machines made entirely from silicone and actuated by embedded pneumatics, to speculate about architectural environments capable of interacting with humans. In a radical departure from traditional mechanical conceptions based on modalities of assembly, the design of these types of soft machines is derived from soft organisms such as molluscs (octopi, snails, jellyfish) in order to infuse them with notions of flexibility, compliance, sensitivity, passive dynamics and spatial variability. Challenging architecture’s alliance with notions of permanence and monumentality, the thesis finally formulates a critique of static typologisation of space with walls, floors, columns or windows. In proposing an embodied architecture the thesis concludes by speculating about architecture as a capacitated, sensitive and sensual body informed by reciprocal conditioning of constituent systems, materials, morphologies and behaviours

The virtual observing agent in music: a theory of agential perspective as implied by indexical gesture

The human body is inseparable from our understanding of music. Through embodied cognition, listeners conceptualize music as performed action. We find evidence of this in our most fundamental musical language. “High” pitches resonate high in a singer’s head, while “fast” rhythms resemble fast bodily movement. Scholars have followed the entailments of these metaphors in recent decades, developing theories of bodily gesture (Hatten 2004, Lidov 2005) and physical mimesis (Cox 2011). These hold that the bodily movement that we hear in music can imitate the physical gestures that we use in everyday communication (e.g., waving, nodding, bowing, or sighing). This has its own entailments; most fundamentally, it implies the presence of a virtual, human-like agent within music that is similar to the “virtual persona” theorized by Edward T. Cone (1974). In other words, in perceiving musical sounds as imitative of physical movement and gesture, we infer the presence of a virtual agent who enacts them. This dissertation extends these theories, demonstrating that musical gestures can be mimetic of indexical somatic movements—that is, bodily movements of pointing, looking, striving, and reaching. These indexical gestures suggest the presence of a virtual observing agent. The virtual observing agent acts a lens through which we, the listener, can experience the interior world (diegesis) of a work. This leads us to embody a single and more individualized perspective on the musical representation. I explore the implications of indexical gesture and perspective with an examination of music from the common practice period. Moreover, I bring the theory of virtual observing agency together with theories of musical narrative and emotion.Musi