31 research outputs found
Reasoning and understanding grasp affordances for robot manipulation
This doctoral research focuses on developing new methods that enable an artificial agent
to grasp and manipulate objects autonomously. More specifically, we are using the concept
of affordances to learn and generalise robot grasping and manipulation techniques. [75] defined affordances as the ability of an agent to perform a certain action with an object in a
given environment. In robotics, affordances defines the possibility of an agent to perform
actions with an object. Therefore, by understanding the relation between actions, objects
and the effect of these actions, the agent understands the task at hand, providing the robot
with the potential to bridge perception to action. The significance of affordances in robotics
has been studied from varied perspectives, such as psychology and cognitive sciences.
Many efforts have been made to pragmatically employ the concept of affordances as it
provides the potential for an artificial agent to perform tasks autonomously. We start by reviewing and finding common ground amongst different strategies that use affordances for
robotic tasks. We build on the identified grounds to provide guidance on including the concept of affordances as a medium to boost autonomy for an artificial agent. To this end, we
outline common design choices to build an affordance relation; and their implications on
the generalisation capabilities of the agent when facing previously unseen scenarios. Based
on our exhaustive review, we conclude that prior research on object affordance detection
is effective, however, among others, it has the following technical gaps: (i) the methods are
limited to a single object ↔ affordance hypothesis, and (ii) they cannot guarantee task completion or any level of performance for the manipulation task alone nor (iii) in collaboration
with other agents. In this research thesis, we propose solutions to these technical challenges.
In an incremental fashion, we start by addressing the limited generalisation capabilities
of, at the time state-of-the-art methods, by strengthening the perception to action connection through the construction of an Knowledge Base (KB). We then leverage the information
encapsulated in the KB to design and implement a reasoning and understanding method
based on statistical relational leaner (SRL) that allows us to cope with uncertainty in testing
environments, and thus, improve generalisation capabilities in affordance-aware manipulation tasks. The KB in conjunctions with our SRL are the base for our designed solutions
that guarantee task completion when the robot is performing a task alone as well as when in
collaboration with other agents. We finally expose and discuss a range of interesting avenues
that have the potential to thrive the capabilities of a robotic agent through the use of the
concept of affordances for manipulation tasks. A summary of the contributions of this thesis
can be found at: https://bit.ly/grasp_affordance_reasonin
Agricultural Structures and Mechanization
In our globalized world, the need to produce quality and safe food has increased exponentially in recent decades to meet the growing demands of the world population. This expectation is being met by acting at multiple levels, but mainly through the introduction of new technologies in the agricultural and agri-food sectors. In this context, agricultural, livestock, agro-industrial buildings, and agrarian infrastructure are being built on the basis of a sophisticated design that integrates environmental, landscape, and occupational safety, new construction materials, new facilities, and mechanization with state-of-the-art automatic systems, using calculation models and computer programs. It is necessary to promote research and dissemination of results in the field of mechanization and agricultural structures, specifically with regard to farm building and rural landscape, land and water use and environment, power and machinery, information systems and precision farming, processing and post-harvest technology and logistics, energy and non-food production technology, systems engineering and management, and fruit and vegetable cultivation systems. This Special Issue focuses on the role that mechanization and agricultural structures play in the production of high-quality food and continuously over time. For this reason, it publishes highly interdisciplinary quality studies from disparate research fields including agriculture, engineering design, calculation and modeling, landscaping, environmentalism, and even ergonomics and occupational risk prevention
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Change and continuity in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has long been reflecting on how to prevent the ‘re-emergence of chemical weapons’ as the verification of the destruction of declared stockpiles continues to approach completion. To deal with this shift in emphasis, a functional rebalancing of activities and resources will likely be required as the OPCW seeks to ensure that the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention remains relevant and effective in future operating environments.
Despite much expert attention, studies that explore and characterise the nature of change within the OPCW are scarce, resulting in gaps in our knowledge regarding the different actors involved, and how processes of change unfold. This stems from ontological and theoretic positions embedded within some mainstream approaches used to examine international organisations, which often treat secretariats as bureaucratic ‘black boxes’, characterising change as the product of state machinations. Moreover, change is often treated as episodic and exceptional, arising from deliberate and controlled efforts.
Drawing on archival research at the Sussex-Harvard Information Bank and participant observation within the OPCW, this thesis investigates how our understanding of changing within the OPCW can be enhanced if we treat the Secretariat as a purposive actor involved in these processes. This enhanced understanding enables a deeper exploration of what change looks like and how it unfolds, providing insights that can support contemporary development.
The thesis uses culture theories to present a unique assessment of the Secretariat through the interaction between formal/official and informal/unofficial cultural manifestations. This gives the Secretariat character, opening the black box and allowing its role in changing to be considered. Then, inspired by the work of Andrew Pettigrew, an analytical framework based on a process metaphysics ontology is employed to examine processes of changing. Three longitudinal case studies are used to examine these processes in response to perceived challenges posed by chemical terrorism and non-state actors. This reveals how States Parties and the Secretariat co-create through long-run processes of change and continuity. Evidence for taking seriously the role of bureaucratic bodies in organisational development is presented, exploring how agency can be variously conceived of, and how changing often tends to be multiplicitious and not confined to a single category.
The thesis has theoretical implications. Approaches that arbitrarily ignore particular actors within (international) organisations should be treated with caution, and where possible inclusivity should be sought. Mainstream theories about change tend to be similarly exclusive, prioritising or prescribing a particular form or type of change. This thesis has demonstrated that a variety of forms of changing can co-exist, suggesting that expanding organisational change approaches might be fruitful. An important insight to emerge is that bureaucracies tend toward dysfunction rather than the ideal-type, and using cultural approaches can open up new spaces for examining relationships between structure and agency across different levels, and bring new dimensions to our understanding of secretariats.
Practical implications include demonstrating how the Secretariat has contributed to organisational capacity and capability to respond to perceived challenges around chemical terrorism and non-state actors. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the OPCW develops. The research argues that as the OPCW functionally rebalances, attention to organisational geographies and identities will need to be part of human resource strategies, as the cultural analysis reveals areas of tension. Finally, the Secretariat are co-creators of organisational changing, and although their inputs and impacts can be hidden, indirect, or informal, this research reveals they are productive. This suggests that more evidence-based research is needed to examine the role of secretarial components in organisational changing. During times of normative stress and functional uncertainty, this must be a priority
Advances in Intelligent Robotics and Collaborative Automation
This book provides an overview of a series of advanced research lines in robotics as well as of design and development methodologies for intelligent robots and their intelligent components. It represents a selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications IDAACS 2013 that were related to these topics. Its contents integrate state of the art computational intelligence based techniques for automatic robot control to novel distributed sensing and data integration methodologies that can be applied to intelligent robotics and automation systems. The objective of the text was to provide an overview of some of the problems in the field of robotic systems and intelligent automation and the approaches and techniques that relevant research groups within this area are employing to try to solve them.The contributions of the different authors have been grouped into four main sections:• Robots• Control and Intelligence• Sensing• Collaborative automationThe chapters have been structured to provide an easy to follow introduction to the topics that are addressed, including the most relevant references, so that anyone interested in this field can get started in the area
Humanoid Robots
For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion
Climbing and Walking Robots
With the advancement of technology, new exciting approaches enable us to render mobile robotic systems more versatile, robust and cost-efficient. Some researchers combine climbing and walking techniques with a modular approach, a reconfigurable approach, or a swarm approach to realize novel prototypes as flexible mobile robotic platforms featuring all necessary locomotion capabilities. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the latest wide-range achievements in climbing and walking robotic technology to researchers, scientists, and engineers throughout the world. Different aspects including control simulation, locomotion realization, methodology, and system integration are presented from the scientific and from the technical point of view. This book consists of two main parts, one dealing with walking robots, the second with climbing robots. The content is also grouped by theoretical research and applicative realization. Every chapter offers a considerable amount of interesting and useful information
Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications
This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topical sections on haptic science, haptic technology, and haptic applications. This year's focus is on accessibility
Tactile Perception And Visuotactile Integration For Robotic Exploration
As the close perceptual sibling of vision, the sense of touch has historically received less than deserved attention in both human psychology and robotics. In robotics, this may be attributed to at least two reasons. First, it suffers from the vicious cycle of immature sensor technology, which causes industry demand to be low, and then there is even less incentive to make existing sensors in research labs easy to manufacture and marketable. Second, the situation stems from a fear of making contact with the environment, avoided in every way so that visually perceived states do not change before a carefully estimated and ballistically executed physical interaction. Fortunately, the latter viewpoint is starting to change. Work in interactive perception and contact-rich manipulation are on the rise. Good reasons are steering the manipulation and locomotion communities’ attention towards deliberate physical interaction with the environment prior to, during, and after a task.
We approach the problem of perception prior to manipulation, using the sense of touch, for the purpose of understanding the surroundings of an autonomous robot. The overwhelming majority of work in perception for manipulation is based on vision. While vision is a fast and global modality, it is insufficient as the sole modality, especially in environments where the ambient light or the objects therein do not lend themselves to vision, such as in darkness, smoky or dusty rooms in search and rescue, underwater, transparent and reflective objects, and retrieving items inside a bag. Even in normal lighting conditions, during a manipulation task, the target object and fingers are usually occluded from view by the gripper. Moreover, vision-based grasp planners, typically trained in simulation, often make errors that cannot be foreseen until contact. As a step towards addressing these problems, we present first a global shape-based feature descriptor for object recognition using non-prehensile tactile probing alone. Then, we investigate in making the tactile modality, local and slow by nature, more efficient for the task by predicting the most cost-effective moves using active exploration. To combine the local and physical advantages of touch and the fast and global advantages of vision, we propose and evaluate a learning-based method for visuotactile integration for grasping