Radar and RGB-depth sensors for fall detection: a review

This paper reviews recent works in the literature on the use of systems based on radar and RGB-Depth (RGB-D) sensors for fall detection, and discusses outstanding research challenges and trends related to this research field. Systems to detect reliably fall events and promptly alert carers and first responders have gained significant interest in the past few years in order to address the societal issue of an increasing number of elderly people living alone, with the associated risk of them falling and the consequences in terms of health treatments, reduced well-being, and costs. The interest in radar and RGB-D sensors is related to their capability to enable contactless and non-intrusive monitoring, which is an advantage for practical deployment and users’ acceptance and compliance, compared with other sensor technologies, such as video-cameras, or wearables. Furthermore, the possibility of combining and fusing information from The heterogeneous types of sensors is expected to improve the overall performance of practical fall detection systems. Researchers from different fields can benefit from multidisciplinary knowledge and awareness of the latest developments in radar and RGB-D sensors that this paper is discussing

NASA Center for Intelligent Robotic Systems for Space Exploration

NASA's program for the civilian exploration of space is a challenge to scientists and engineers to help maintain and further develop the United States' position of leadership in a focused sphere of space activity. Such an ambitious plan requires the contribution and further development of many scientific and technological fields. One research area essential for the success of these space exploration programs is Intelligent Robotic Systems. These systems represent a class of autonomous and semi-autonomous machines that can perform human-like functions with or without human interaction. They are fundamental for activities too hazardous for humans or too distant or complex for remote telemanipulation. To meet this challenge, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has established an Engineering Research Center for Intelligent Robotic Systems for Space Exploration (CIRSSE). The Center was created with a five year $5.5 million grant from NASA submitted by a team of the Robotics and Automation Laboratories. The Robotics and Automation Laboratories of RPI are the result of the merger of the Robotics and Automation Laboratory of the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering (ECSE) and the Research Laboratory for Kinematics and Robotic Mechanisms of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering, and Mechanics (ME,AE,&M), in 1987. This report is an examination of the activities that are centered at CIRSSE

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Civil Space Technology Initiative: a First Step

This is the first published overview of OAST's focused program, the Civil Space Technology Initiative, (CSTI) which started in FY88. This publication describes the goals, technical approach, current status, and plans for CSTI. Periodic updates are planned

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

Technology assessment of advanced automation for space missions

Six general classes of technology requirements derived during the mission definition phase of the study were identified as having maximum importance and urgency, including autonomous world model based information systems, learning and hypothesis formation, natural language and other man-machine communication, space manufacturing, teleoperators and robot systems, and computer science and technology

Dynamic learning of the environment for eco-citizen behavior

Le développement de villes intelligentes et durables nécessite le déploiement des technologies de l'information et de la communication (ITC) pour garantir de meilleurs services et informations disponibles à tout moment et partout. Comme les dispositifs IoT devenant plus puissants et moins coûteux, la mise en place d'un réseau de capteurs dans un contexte urbain peut être coûteuse. Cette thèse propose une technique pour estimer les informations environnementales manquantes dans des environnements à large échelle. Notre technique permet de fournir des informations alors que les dispositifs ne sont pas disponibles dans une zone de l'environnement non couverte par des capteurs. La contribution de notre proposition est résumée dans les points suivants : - limiter le nombre de dispositifs de détection à déployer dans un environnement urbain ; - l'exploitation de données hétérogènes acquises par des dispositifs intermittents ; - le traitement en temps réel des informations ; - l'auto-calibration du système. Notre proposition utilise l'approche AMAS (Adaptive Multi-Agent System) pour résoudre le problème de l'indisponibilité des informations. Dans cette approche, une exception est considérée comme une situation non coopérative (NCS) qui doit être résolue localement et de manière coopérative. HybridIoT exploite à la fois des informations homogènes (informations du même type) et hétérogènes (informations de différents types ou unités) acquises à partir d'un capteur disponible pour fournir des estimations précises au point de l'environnement où un capteur n'est pas disponible. La technique proposée permet d'estimer des informations environnementales précises dans des conditions de variabilité résultant du contexte d'application urbaine dans lequel le projet est situé, et qui n'ont pas été explorées par les solutions de l'état de l'art : - ouverture : les capteurs peuvent entrer ou sortir du système à tout moment sans qu'aucune configuration particulière soit nécessaire ; - large échelle : le système peut être déployé dans un contexte urbain à large échelle et assurer un fonctionnement correct avec un nombre significatif de dispositifs ; - hétérogénéité : le système traite différents types d'informations sans aucune configuration a priori. Notre proposition ne nécessite aucun paramètre d'entrée ni aucune reconfiguration. Le système peut fonctionner dans des environnements ouverts et dynamiques tels que les villes, où un grand nombre de capteurs peuvent apparaître ou disparaître à tout moment et sans aucun préavis. Nous avons fait différentes expérimentations pour comparer les résultats obtenus à plusieurs techniques standard afin d'évaluer la validité de notre proposition. Nous avons également développé un ensemble de techniques standard pour produire des résultats de base qui seront comparés à ceux obtenus par notre proposition multi-agents.The development of sustainable smart cities requires the deployment of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to ensure better services and available information at any time and everywhere. As IoT devices become more powerful and low-cost, the implementation of an extensive sensor network for an urban context can be expensive. This thesis proposes a technique for estimating missing environmental information in large scale environments. Our technique enables providing information whereas devices are not available for an area of the environment not covered by sensing devices. The contribution of our proposal is summarized in the following points: * limiting the number of sensing devices to be deployed in an urban environment; * the exploitation of heterogeneous data acquired from intermittent devices; * real-time processing of information; * self-calibration of the system. Our proposal uses the Adaptive Multi-Agent System (AMAS) approach to solve the problem of information unavailability. In this approach, an exception is considered as a Non-Cooperative Situation (NCS) that has to be solved locally and cooperatively. HybridIoT exploits both homogeneous (information of the same type) and heterogeneous information (information of different types or units) acquired from some available sensing device to provide accurate estimates in the point of the environment where a sensing device is not available. The proposed technique enables estimating accurate environmental information under conditions of uncertainty arising from the urban application context in which the project is situated, and which have not been explored by the state-of-the-art solutions: * openness: sensors can enter or leave the system at any time without the need for any reconfiguration; * large scale: the system can be deployed in a large, urban context and ensure correct operation with a significative number of devices; * heterogeneity: the system handles different types of information without any a priori configuration. Our proposal does not require any input parameters or reconfiguration. The system can operate in open, dynamic environments such as cities, where a large number of sensing devices can appear or disappear at any time and without any prior notification. We carried out different experiments to compare the obtained results to various standard techniques to assess the validity of our proposal. We also developed a pipeline of standard techniques to produce baseline results that will be compared to those obtained by our multi-agent proposal

Model-driven engineering approach to design and implementation of robot control system

In this paper we apply a model-driven engineering approach to designing domain-specific solutions for robot control system development. We present a case study of the complete process, including identification of the domain meta-model, graphical notation definition and source code generation for subsumption architecture -- a well-known example of robot control architecture. Our goal is to show that both the definition of the robot-control architecture and its supporting tools fits well into the typical workflow of model-driven engineering development.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2011 (arXiv:cs/1212.3308