Designing a Virtual Manikin Animation Framework Aimed at Virtual Prototyping

International audienceIn the industry, numerous commercial packages provide tools to introduce, and analyse human behaviour in the product's environment (for maintenance, ergonomics...), thanks to Virtual Humans. We will focus on control. Thanks to algorithms newly introduced in recent research papers, we think we can provide an implementation, which even widens, and simplifies the animation capacities of virtual manikins. In order to do so, we are going to express the industrial expectations as for Virtual Humans, without considering feasibility (not to bias the issue). The second part will show that no commercial application provides the tools that perfectly meet the needs. Thus we propose a new animation framework that better answers the problem. Our contribution is the integration - driven by need ~ of available new scientific techniques to animate Virtual Humans, in a new control scheme that better answers industrial expectations

Virtual reality for assembly methods prototyping: a review

Assembly planning and evaluation is an important component of the product design process in which details about how parts of a new product will be put together are formalized. A well designed assembly process should take into account various factors such as optimum assembly time and sequence, tooling and fixture requirements, ergonomics, operator safety, and accessibility, among others. Existing computer-based tools to support virtual assembly either concentrate solely on representation of the geometry of parts and fixtures and evaluation of clearances and tolerances or use simulated human mannequins to approximate human interaction in the assembly process. Virtual reality technology has the potential to support integration of natural human motions into the computer aided assembly planning environment (Ritchie et al. in Proc I MECH E Part B J Eng 213(5):461–474, 1999). This would allow evaluations of an assembler’s ability to manipulate and assemble parts and result in reduced time and cost for product design. This paper provides a review of the research in virtual assembly and categorizes the different approaches. Finally, critical requirements and directions for future research are presented

Business process management: a bird's-eye view and research agenda.

Processes; Management; Research;

Study of the trajectories of visually guided movement of unimanual and bimanual tasks

Restitution of upper limb mobility following stroke is one of the major challenges facing clinicians in the country today. The complexity of performing skilled tasks with fine movements makes restitution of mobility all the more complex for rehabilitation specialists. Although several techniques have been evolved for, limited success with transfer of training from the clinical environment to functional performance clearly indicates a need for research and development in the area of upper extremity rehabilitation. Bimanual coordination has recently surfaced as a novel and effective way to fast and lasting recovery. The success of bimanually coordinated training encourages a better understanding of the underlying neural, physiological and engineering principles involved which in turn would result in improved treatments for people with hemiparesis. An apparatus developed in this project enables such an understanding, by successfully being able to collect, record and analyze the movement trajectories of both the hands simultaneously with a high degree of accuracy

Classifying Compliant Manipulation Tasks for Automated Planning in Robotics

Many household chores and industrial manufacturing tasks require a certain compliant behavior to make deliberate physical contact with the environment. This compliant behavior can be implemented by modern robotic manipulators. However, in order to plan the task execution, a robot requires generic process models of these tasks which can be adapted to different domains and varying environmental conditions. In this work we propose a classification of compliant manipulation tasks meeting these requirements, to derive related actions for automated planning. We also present a classification for the sub-category of wiping tasks, which are most common and of great importance in service robotics. We categorize actions from an object-centric perspective to make them independent of any specific robot kinematics. The aim of the proposed taxonomy is to guide robotic programmers to develop generic actions for any kind of robotic systems in arbitrary domains

Advanced grasping with the Pisa/IIT softHand

This chapter presents the hardware, software and overall strategy used by the team UNIPI-IIT-QB to participate to the Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition. It relies on the PISA/IIT SoftHand, which is underactuated soft robotic hand that can adapt to the grasped object shape and is compliant with the environment. It was used for the hand-in-hand and for the simulation tracks, where the team reached first and third places respectively

Tackling High Variability in Video Surveillance Systems through a Model Transformation Approach

taux acceptation 44%International audienceThis work explores how model-driven engineering techniques can support the configuration of systems in domains presenting multiple variability factors. Video surveillance is a good candidate for which we have an extensive experience. Ultimately, we wish to automatically generate a software component assembly from an application specification, using model to model transformations. The challenge is to cope with variability both at the specification and at the implementation levels. Our approach advocates a clear separation of concerns. More precisely, we propose two feature models, one for task specification and the other for software components. The first model can be transformed into one or several valid component configurations through step-wise specialization. This paper outlines our approach, focusing on the two feature models and their relations. We particularly insist on variability and constraint modeling in order to achieve the mapping from domain variability to software variability through model transformations

Grasp Analysis Tools for Synergistic Underactuated Robotic Hands

Despite being a classical topic in robotics, the research on dexterous robotic hands still stirs a lively research activity. The current interest is especially attracted by underactuated robotic hands where a high number of degrees of freedom (DoFs), and a relatively low number of degrees of actuation co-exist. The correlation between the DoFs obtained through a wise distribution of actuators is aimed at simplifying the control with a minimal loss of dexterity. In this sense, the application of bio-inspired principles is bringing research toward a more conscious design. This work proposes new, general approaches for the analysis of grasps with synergistic underactuated robotic hands.After a review of the quasi-static equations describing the system, where contact preload is also considered, two different approaches to the analysis are presented. The first one is based on a systematic combination of the equations. The independent and the dependent variables are defined, and cause-effect relationships between them are found. In addition, remarkable properties of the grasp, as the subspace of controllable internal force and the grasp compliance, are worked out in symbolic form. Then, some relevant kinds of tasks, such as pure squeeze, spurious squeeze and kinematic grasp displacements, are defined, in terms of nullity or non-nullity of proper variables. The second method of analysis shows how to discover the feasibility of the pre-defined tasks, operating a systematic decomposition of the solution space of the system. As a result, the inputs to be given to the hand, in order to achieve the desired system displacements, are found. The study of the feasible variations is carried out arriving at the discovery of all the combinations of nullity and/or non-nullity variables which are allowed by the equations describing the system. Numerical results are presented both for precision and power grasps, finding forces and displacements that the hand can impose on the object, and showing which properties are preserved after the introduction of a synergistic underactuation mechanism