Character Recognition

Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field

Towards a Vision-Based Mobile Manipulator for Autonomous Chess Gameplay

With the rise of robotic arms in both industrial and research applications, a growing need is observed for autonomous robotic arm applications. This thesis aims to provide an example case of this need and also to showcase the possibility and limitations of vision-based solutions, specifically in automating chess. The focus is on developing a modular system that is able to autonomously recognize chessboard, detect and manipulate chess pieces. The modular design allows for further exploration into autonomous mobile manipulators. The key components include chessboard recognition using fiducial markers to facilitate accurate chessboard recognition and utilizing image processing techniques like segmentation, absolute difference matching, and perspective warping to analyze and extract meaningful information. By mounting a camera above the chessboard, it enables the detection algorithm to accurately capture and analyze the most important information about the environment to determine the current state of the game. Using this information, human move detection is enabled. Then, a custom protocol is utilized to communicate between the detection algorithm and the chess engine, encapsulating information about the game state changes within the system. The chess engine serves the purpose of game analysis and provides legal moves for the robot manipulator to execute. Manipulation happens through careful motion planning and execution, ensuring the safety of the robot and its environment. Extensive evaluation proves that the system demonstrates high accuracy and success rates for piece manipulation and move detection

Human-like arm motion generation: a review

In the last decade, the objectives outlined by the needs of personal robotics have led to the rise of new biologically-inspired techniques for arm motion planning. This paper presents a literature review of the most recent research on the generation of human-like arm movements in humanoid and manipulation robotic systems. Search methods and inclusion criteria are described. The studies are analyzed taking into consideration the sources of publication, the experimental settings, the type of movements, the technical approach, and the human motor principles that have been used to inspire and assess human-likeness. Results show that there is a strong focus on the generation of single-arm reaching movements and biomimetic-based methods. However, there has been poor attention to manipulation, obstacle-avoidance mechanisms, and dual-arm motion generation. For these reasons, human-like arm motion generation may not fully respect human behavioral and neurological key features and may result restricted to specific tasks of human-robot interaction. Limitations and challenges are discussed to provide meaningful directions for future investigations.FCT Project UID/MAT/00013/2013FCT–Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020

An Innovative Human Machine Interface for UAS Flight Management System

The thesis is relative to the development of an innovative Human Machine Interface for UAS Flight Management System. In particular, touchscreena have been selected as data entry interface. The thesis has been done together at Alenia Aermacch

Handwriting velcro: Endowing AR glasses with personalized and posture-adaptive text input using flexible touch sensor

Text input is a desired feature for AR glasses. While there already exist various input modalities (e.g., voice, mid-air gesture), the diverse demands required by different input scenarios can hardly be met by the small number of fixed input postures offered by existing solutions. In this paper, we present Handwriting Velcro, a novel text input solution for AR glasses based on flexible touch sensors. The distinct advantage of our system is that it can easily stick to different body parts, thus endowing AR glasses with posture-adaptive handwriting input. We explored the design space of on-body device positions and identified the best interaction positions for various user postures. To flatten users' learning curves, we adapt our device to the established writing habits of different users by training a 36-character (i.e., A-Z, 0-9) recognition neural network in a human-in-the-loop manner. Such a personalization attempt ultimately achieves a low error rate of 0.005 on average for users with different writing styles. Subjective feedback shows that our solution has a good performance in system practicability and social acceptance. Empirically, we conducted a heuristic study to explore and identify the best interaction Position-Posture Correlation. Experimental results show that our Handwriting Velcro excels similar work [6] and commercial product in both practicality (12.3 WPM) and user-friendliness in different contexts

Automation and Robotics: Latest Achievements, Challenges and Prospects

This SI presents the latest achievements, challenges and prospects for drives, actuators, sensors, controls and robot navigation with reverse validation and applications in the field of industrial automation and robotics. Automation, supported by robotics, can effectively speed up and improve production. The industrialization of complex mechatronic components, especially robots, requires a large number of special processes already in the pre-production stage provided by modelling and simulation. This area of research from the very beginning includes drives, process technology, actuators, sensors, control systems and all connections in mechatronic systems. Automation and robotics form broad-spectrum areas of research, which are tightly interconnected. To reduce costs in the pre-production stage and to reduce production preparation time, it is necessary to solve complex tasks in the form of simulation with the use of standard software products and new technologies that allow, for example, machine vision and other imaging tools to examine new physical contexts, dependencies and connections

NASA space station automation: AI-based technology review

Research and Development projects in automation for the Space Station are discussed. Artificial Intelligence (AI) based automation technologies are planned to enhance crew safety through reduced need for EVA, increase crew productivity through the reduction of routine operations, increase space station autonomy, and augment space station capability through the use of teleoperation and robotics. AI technology will also be developed for the servicing of satellites at the Space Station, system monitoring and diagnosis, space manufacturing, and the assembly of large space structures