5,160 research outputs found
A Low-Cost Tele-Presence Wheelchair System
This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a tele-presence
wheelchair system based on tele-presence robot, intelligent wheelchair, and
touch screen technologies. The tele-presence wheelchair system consists of a
commercial electric wheelchair, an add-on tele-presence interaction module, and
a touchable live video image based user interface (called TIUI). The
tele-presence interaction module is used to provide video-chatting for an
elderly or disabled person with the family members or caregivers, and also
captures the live video of an environment for tele-operation and
semi-autonomous navigation. The user interface developed in our lab allows an
operator to access the system anywhere and directly touch the live video image
of the wheelchair to push it as if he/she did it in the presence. This paper
also discusses the evaluation of the user experience
In-home and remote use of robotic body surrogates by people with profound motor deficits
By controlling robots comparable to the human body, people with profound
motor deficits could potentially perform a variety of physical tasks for
themselves, improving their quality of life. The extent to which this is
achievable has been unclear due to the lack of suitable interfaces by which to
control robotic body surrogates and a dearth of studies involving substantial
numbers of people with profound motor deficits. We developed a novel, web-based
augmented reality interface that enables people with profound motor deficits to
remotely control a PR2 mobile manipulator from Willow Garage, which is a
human-scale, wheeled robot with two arms. We then conducted two studies to
investigate the use of robotic body surrogates. In the first study, 15 novice
users with profound motor deficits from across the United States controlled a
PR2 in Atlanta, GA to perform a modified Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) and a
simulated self-care task. Participants achieved clinically meaningful
improvements on the ARAT and 12 of 15 participants (80%) successfully completed
the simulated self-care task. Participants agreed that the robotic system was
easy to use, was useful, and would provide a meaningful improvement in their
lives. In the second study, one expert user with profound motor deficits had
free use of a PR2 in his home for seven days. He performed a variety of
self-care and household tasks, and also used the robot in novel ways. Taking
both studies together, our results suggest that people with profound motor
deficits can improve their quality of life using robotic body surrogates, and
that they can gain benefit with only low-level robot autonomy and without
invasive interfaces. However, methods to reduce the rate of errors and increase
operational speed merit further investigation.Comment: 43 Pages, 13 Figure
Human-Machine Interface for Remote Training of Robot Tasks
Regardless of their industrial or research application, the streamlining of
robot operations is limited by the proximity of experienced users to the actual
hardware. Be it massive open online robotics courses, crowd-sourcing of robot
task training, or remote research on massive robot farms for machine learning,
the need to create an apt remote Human-Machine Interface is quite prevalent.
The paper at hand proposes a novel solution to the programming/training of
remote robots employing an intuitive and accurate user-interface which offers
all the benefits of working with real robots without imposing delays and
inefficiency. The system includes: a vision-based 3D hand detection and gesture
recognition subsystem, a simulated digital twin of a robot as visual feedback,
and the "remote" robot learning/executing trajectories using dynamic motion
primitives. Our results indicate that the system is a promising solution to the
problem of remote training of robot tasks.Comment: Accepted in IEEE International Conference on Imaging Systems and
Techniques - IST201
Sistema de telepresencia controlado por una interfaz cerebro-computador: pruebas iniciales con pacientes de ELA
Las interfaces cerebro-ordenador (BCIs, siglas de su término inglés Brain-Computer Interfaces) proporcionan a sus usuarios comunicación y control únicamente con su actividad cerebral. Éstas no dependen de los canales de salida habituales del cerebro de nervios periféricos y músculos, abriendo un nuevo y valioso canal de comunicación para personas con enfermedades neurológicas o musculares severas, tales como la esclerosis lateral amiotrófica (ELA), infarto cerebral, parálisis cerebral, y daños en la médula espinal. La combinación de las interfaces cerebro-ordenador con la robótica puede dotar a los usuarios de una entidad fÃsica personicada en un entorno real (en cualquier parte del mundo con acceso a Internet) preparada para percibir, explorar, e interaccionar, controlada únicamente con la actividad cerebral. Además, ha sido sugerido que este tipo de sistemas podrÃa proporcionar benecios en patientes de ELA dentro del contexto de neurorehabilitación o mantenimiento de la actividad neural. Esta tesis fin de máster presenta el proceso completo de desarrollo de un prototipo inicial de un sistema de telepresencia basado en BCIs y su evaluación con usuarios sanos, y su posterior rediseño (para cubrir las necesidades de pacientes reales) y evaluación con pacientes de ELA. Los resultados mostraron la viabilidad de esta tecnologÃa en pacientes reales
Service-Oriented Architecture for Space Exploration Robotic Rover Systems
Currently, industrial sectors are transforming their business processes into
e-services and component-based architectures to build flexible, robust, and
scalable systems, and reduce integration-related maintenance and development
costs. Robotics is yet another promising and fast-growing industry that deals
with the creation of machines that operate in an autonomous fashion and serve
for various applications including space exploration, weaponry, laboratory
research, and manufacturing. It is in space exploration that the most common
type of robots is the planetary rover which moves across the surface of a
planet and conducts a thorough geological study of the celestial surface. This
type of rover system is still ad-hoc in that it incorporates its software into
its core hardware making the whole system cohesive, tightly-coupled, more
susceptible to shortcomings, less flexible, hard to be scaled and maintained,
and impossible to be adapted to other purposes. This paper proposes a
service-oriented architecture for space exploration robotic rover systems made
out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed architecture
consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that corresponds to the
actual rover; the server tier that corresponds to the web services; and the
middleware tier that corresponds to an Enterprise Service Bus which promotes
interoperability between the interconnected entities. The niche of this
architecture is that rover's software components are decoupled and isolated
from the rover's body and possibly deployed at a distant location. A
service-oriented architecture promotes integrate-ability, scalability,
reusability, maintainability, and interoperability for client-to-server
communication.Comment: LACSC - Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences,
http://www.lacsc.org/; International Journal of Science & Emerging
Technologies (IJSET), Vol. 3, No. 2, February 201
Towards edge robotics: the progress from cloud-based robotic systems to intelligent and context-aware robotic services
Current robotic systems handle a different range of applications such as video surveillance, delivery
of goods, cleaning, material handling, assembly, painting, or pick and place services. These systems
have been embraced not only by the general population but also by the vertical industries to
help them in performing daily activities. Traditionally, the robotic systems have been deployed in
standalone robots that were exclusively dedicated to performing a specific task such as cleaning the
floor in indoor environments. In recent years, cloud providers started to offer their infrastructures
to robotic systems for offloading some of the robot’s functions. This ultimate form of the distributed
robotic system was first introduced 10 years ago as cloud robotics and nowadays a lot of robotic solutions
are appearing in this form. As a result, standalone robots became software-enhanced objects
with increased reconfigurability as well as decreased complexity and cost. Moreover, by offloading
the heavy processing from the robot to the cloud, it is easier to share services and information from
various robots or agents to achieve better cooperation and coordination.
Cloud robotics is suitable for human-scale responsive and delay-tolerant robotic functionalities
(e.g., monitoring, predictive maintenance). However, there is a whole set of real-time robotic applications
(e.g., remote control, motion planning, autonomous navigation) that can not be executed with
cloud robotics solutions, mainly because cloud facilities traditionally reside far away from the robots.
While the cloud providers can ensure certain performance in their infrastructure, very little can be
ensured in the network between the robots and the cloud, especially in the last hop where wireless
radio access networks are involved. Over the last years advances in edge computing, fog computing,
5G NR, network slicing, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and network orchestration are stimulating
the interest of the industrial sector to satisfy the stringent and real-time requirements of their
applications. Robotic systems are a key piece in the industrial digital transformation and their benefits
are very well studied in the literature. However, designing and implementing a robotic system
that integrates all the emerging technologies and meets the connectivity requirements (e.g., latency,
reliability) is an ambitious task.
This thesis studies the integration of modern Information andCommunication Technologies (ICTs)
in robotic systems and proposes some robotic enhancements that tackle the real-time constraints of
robotic services. To evaluate the performance of the proposed enhancements, this thesis departs
from the design and prototype implementation of an edge native robotic system that embodies the concepts of edge computing, fog computing, orchestration, and virtualization. The proposed edge
robotics system serves to represent two exemplary robotic applications. In particular, autonomous
navigation of mobile robots and remote-control of robot manipulator where the end-to-end robotic
system is distributed between the robots and the edge server. The open-source prototype implementation
of the designed edge native robotic system resulted in the creation of two real-world testbeds
that are used in this thesis as a baseline scenario for the evaluation of new innovative solutions in
robotic systems.
After detailing the design and prototype implementation of the end-to-end edge native robotic
system, this thesis proposes several enhancements that can be offered to robotic systems by adapting
the concept of edge computing via the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) framework. First, it
proposes exemplary network context-aware enhancements in which the real-time information about
robot connectivity and location can be used to dynamically adapt the end-to-end system behavior to
the actual status of the communication (e.g., radio channel). Three different exemplary context-aware
enhancements are proposed that aim to optimize the end-to-end edge native robotic system. Later,
the thesis studies the capability of the edge native robotic system to offer potential savings by means of
computation offloading for robot manipulators in different deployment configurations. Further, the
impact of different wireless channels (e.g., 5G, 4G andWi-Fi) to support the data exchange between a
robot manipulator and its remote controller are assessed.
In the following part of the thesis, the focus is set on how orchestration solutions can support
mobile robot systems to make high quality decisions. The application of OKpi as an orchestration algorithm
and DLT-based federation are studied to meet the KPIs that autonomously controlledmobile
robots have in order to provide uninterrupted connectivity over the radio access network. The elaborated
solutions present high compatibility with the designed edge robotics system where the robot
driving range is extended without any interruption of the end-to-end edge robotics service. While the
DLT-based federation extends the robot driving range by deploying access point extension on top of
external domain infrastructure, OKpi selects the most suitable access point and computing resource
in the cloud-to-thing continuum in order to fulfill the latency requirements of autonomously controlled
mobile robots.
To conclude the thesis the focus is set on how robotic systems can improve their performance by
leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to generate smart decisions.
To do so, the edge native robotic system is presented as a true embodiment of a Cyber-Physical
System (CPS) in Industry 4.0, showing the mission of AI in such concept. It presents the key enabling
technologies of the edge robotic system such as edge, fog, and 5G, where the physical processes are
integrated with computing and network domains. The role of AI in each technology domain is identified
by analyzing a set of AI agents at the application and infrastructure level. In the last part of the
thesis, the movement prediction is selected to study the feasibility of applying a forecast-based recovery
mechanism for real-time remote control of robotic manipulators (FoReCo) that uses ML to infer
lost commands caused by interference in the wireless channel. The obtained results are showcasing
the its potential in simulation and real-world experimentation.Programa de Doctorado en IngenierÃa Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Karl Holger.- Secretario: Joerg Widmer.- Vocal: Claudio Cicconett
Security Robot
As robotic technology continues to advance, robots are becoming capable of performing ever more complex tasks. Robotic workers never get tired, do not need to be paid, and can be made to perform even the most dangerous tasks without concern. The purpose of this project was to combine several existing technologies, wireless internet, neural networks, and hardware controllers, into a system that can perform the job of a night security guard
Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people
This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of
elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly
people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new
applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses
the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and
users for which service robots are and are not suitable
- …