14,175 research outputs found
Towards Autonomous Selective Harvesting: A Review of Robot Perception, Robot Design, Motion Planning and Control
This paper provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art in selective
harvesting robots (SHRs) and their potential for addressing the challenges of
global food production. SHRs have the potential to increase productivity,
reduce labour costs, and minimise food waste by selectively harvesting only
ripe fruits and vegetables. The paper discusses the main components of SHRs,
including perception, grasping, cutting, motion planning, and control. It also
highlights the challenges in developing SHR technologies, particularly in the
areas of robot design, motion planning and control. The paper also discusses
the potential benefits of integrating AI and soft robots and data-driven
methods to enhance the performance and robustness of SHR systems. Finally, the
paper identifies several open research questions in the field and highlights
the need for further research and development efforts to advance SHR
technologies to meet the challenges of global food production. Overall, this
paper provides a starting point for researchers and practitioners interested in
developing SHRs and highlights the need for more research in this field.Comment: Preprint: to be appeared in Journal of Field Robotic
Ausubel's meaningful learning re-visited
This review provides a critique of David Ausubel’s theory of meaningful learning and the use of advance organizers in teaching. It takes into account the developments in cognition and neuroscience which have taken place in the 50 or so years since he advanced his ideas, developments which challenge our understanding of cognitive structure and the recall of prior learning. These include (i) how effective questioning to ascertain previous knowledge necessitates in-depth Socratic dialogue; (ii) how many findings in cognition and neuroscience indicate that memory may be non-representational, thereby affecting our interpretation of student recollections; (iii) the now recognised dynamism of memory; (iv) usefully regarding concepts as abilities or simulators and skills; (v) acknowledging conscious and unconscious memory and imagery; (vi) how conceptual change involves conceptual coexistence and revision; (vii) noting linguistic and neural pathways as a result of experience and neural selection; and (viii) recommending that wider concepts of scaffolding should be adopted, particularly given the increasing focus on collaborative learning in a technological world
Grasping nothing: a study of minimal ontologies and the sense of music
If music were to have a proper sense – one in which it is truly given – one might reasonably place this in sound and aurality. I contend, however, that no such sense exists; rather, the sense of music takes place, and it does so with the impossible. To this end, this thesis – which is a work of philosophy and music – advances an ontology of the impossible (i.e., it thinks the being of what, properly speaking, can have no being) and considers its implications for music, articulating how ontological aporias – of the event, of thinking the absolute, and of sovereignty’s dismemberment – imply senses of music that are anterior to sound. John Cage’s Silent Prayer, a nonwork he never composed, compels a rerethinking of silence on the basis of its contradictory status of existence; Florian Hecker et al.’s Speculative Solution offers a basis for thinking absolute music anew to the precise extent that it is a discourse of meaninglessness; and Manfred Werder’s [yearn] pieces exhibit exemplarily that music’s sense depends on the possibility of its counterfeiting. Inso-much as these accounts produce musical senses that take the place of sound, they are also understood to be performances of these pieces. Here, then, thought is music’s organon and its instrument
DefGraspNets: Grasp Planning on 3D Fields with Graph Neural Nets
Robotic grasping of 3D deformable objects is critical for real-world
applications such as food handling and robotic surgery. Unlike rigid and
articulated objects, 3D deformable objects have infinite degrees of freedom.
Fully defining their state requires 3D deformation and stress fields, which are
exceptionally difficult to analytically compute or experimentally measure.
Thus, evaluating grasp candidates for grasp planning typically requires
accurate, but slow 3D finite element method (FEM) simulation. Sampling-based
grasp planning is often impractical, as it requires evaluation of a large
number of grasp candidates. Gradient-based grasp planning can be more
efficient, but requires a differentiable model to synthesize optimal grasps
from initial candidates. Differentiable FEM simulators may fill this role, but
are typically no faster than standard FEM. In this work, we propose learning a
predictive graph neural network (GNN), DefGraspNets, to act as our
differentiable model. We train DefGraspNets to predict 3D stress and
deformation fields based on FEM-based grasp simulations. DefGraspNets not only
runs up to 1500 times faster than the FEM simulator, but also enables fast
gradient-based grasp optimization over 3D stress and deformation metrics. We
design DefGraspNets to align with real-world grasp planning practices and
demonstrate generalization across multiple test sets, including real-world
experiments.Comment: To be published in the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA), 202
Ecological-enactive account of autism spectrum disorder
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by
persistent deficits in social interaction and communication, and restricted, repetitive
patterns of behavior and interests. To build an ecological-enactive account of autism, I
propose we should endorse the affordance-based approach of the skilled intentionality
framework (SIF). In SIF, embodied cognition is understood as skilled engagement
with affordances in the sociomaterial environment of the ecological niche by which an
individual tends toward the optimal grip. The human econiche offers awhole landscape
of affordances, and situated individuals respond to a field of relevant affordances.
An important part of SIF is an ecological-enactive interpretation of the free energy
principle and predictive processing. Predictive processing accounts indicate that in
ASD too much precision is assigned to prediction errors. Autistic persons depend
heavily on current sensory information and less on prior beliefs and cannot attune to
stable regularities. To reduce uncertainty, they over-rely on routines, strict habits, and
a familiar environment—a predictable ecological niche they construct. I argue that
skilled intentionality gives us the framework from which to analyze the autistic field
of affordances. Autistic patterns of affordance-related bodily states of action readiness
are only sensitive to very specific solicitations in the environment and achieve optimal
grip in well-known situations. Autism is to be understood as a disorder of bodily
normativity. Taking this approach helps us figure out what neurotypical people can
do to attune their environment in order to scaffold the needs of autistic individuals by
redesigning the landscape of affordances
Violation-Free Inter-Sampling Safety: from Control Barrier Functions to Tunable Controllers with Input-to-State Safety Guarantees
A common assumption on the deployment of safeguarding controllers on the
digital platform is that high sampling frequency translates to a small
violation of safety. This paper investigates and formalizes this assumption
through the lens of Input-to-State Safety. From this perspective, we propose an
alternative solution for maintaining safety of sample-and-hold controlled
systems without any violation to the original safe set. Our approach centers
around modulating the sampled control input in order to guarantee a more robust
safety condition. We analyze both the time-triggered and the event-triggered
sample-and-hold implementations, including the characterization of sampling
frequency requirements and trigger conditions. We demonstrate the effectiveness
of our approach in the context of adaptive cruise control through simulations.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 202
Animating potential for intensities and becoming in writing: challenging discursively constructed structures and writing conventions in academia through the use of storying and other post qualitative inquiries
Written for everyone ever denied the opportunity of fulfilling their academic potential, this is ‘Chloe’s story’. Using composite selves, a phrase chosen to indicate multiplicities and movement, to story both the initial event leading to ‘Chloe’s’ immediate withdrawal from a Further Education college and an imaginary second chance to support her whilst at university, this Deleuzo-Guattarian (2015a) ‘assemblage’ of post qualitative inquiries offers challenge to discursively constructed structures and writing conventions in academia. Adopting a posthuman approach to theorising to shift attention towards affects and intensities always relationally in action in multiple ‘assemblages’, these inquiries aim to decentre individual ‘lecturer’ and ‘student’ identities. Illuminating movements and moments quivering with potential for change, then, hoping thereby to generate second chances for all, different approaches to writing are exemplified which trouble those academic constraints by fostering inquiry and speculation: moving away from ‘what is’ towards ‘what if’.
With the formatting of this thesis itself also always troubling the rigid Deleuzo-Guattarian (2015a) ‘segmentary lines’ structuring orthodox academic practice, imbricated in these inquiries are attempts to exemplify Manning’s (2015; 2016) ‘artfulness’ through shifts in thinking within and around an emerging PhD thesis. As writing resists organising, the verb thesisising comes into play to describe the processes involved in creating this always-moving thesis. Using ‘landing sites’ (Arakawa and Gins, 2009) as a landscaping device, freely creating emerging ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015a) so often denied to students forced to adhere to strict academic conventions, this ‘movement-moving’ (Manning, 2014) opens up opportunities for change as in Manning’s (2016) ‘research-creation’. Arguing for a moving away from writing-representing towards writing-inquiring, towards a writing ‘that does’ (Wyatt and Gale, 2018: 127), and toward writing as immanent doing, it is hoped to animate potential for intensities and becoming in writing, offering opportunities and glimmerings of the not-yet-known
The temporality of rhetoric: the spatialization of time in modern criticism
Every conception of criticism conceals a notion of time which informs the manner in which the critic conceives of history, representation and criticism itself. This thesis reveals the philosophies of time inherent in certain key modern critical concepts: allegory, irony and the sublime. Each concept opens a breach in time, a disruption of chronology. In each case this gap or aporia is emphatically closed, elided or denied. Taking the philosophy of time elaborated by Giorgio Agamben as an introductory proposition, my argument turns in Chapter One to the allegorical temporality which Walter Benjamin sees as the time of photography. The second chapter examines the aesthetics of the sublime as melancholic or mournful untimeliness. In Chapter Three, Paul de Man's conception of irony provides an exemplary instance of the denial of this troubling temporal predicament. In opposition to the foreclosure of the disturbing temporalities of criticism, history and representation, the thesis proposes a fundamental rethinking of the philosophy of time as it relates to these categories of reflection. In a reading of an inaugural meditation on the nature of time, and in examining certain key contemporary philosophical and critical texts, I argue for a critical attendance to that which eludes those modes of thought that attempt to map time as a recognizable and essentially spatial field. The Confessions of Augustine provide, in the fourth chapter, a model for thinking through the problems set up earlier: Augustine affords us, precisely, a means of conceiving of the gap or the interim. In the final chapter, this concept is developed with reference to the criticism of Arnold and Eliot, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and the philosophy of cinema derived from Deleuze and Lyotard. In conclusion, the philosophical implications of the thesis are placed in relation to a conception of the untimeliness of death
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