On the design, development and experimentation of the ASTRO assistive robot integrated in smart environments

This paper presents the full experience of designing, developing and testing ASTROMOBILE, a system composed of an enhanced robotic platform integrated in an Ambient Intelligent (AmI) infrastructure that was conceived to provide favourable independent living, improved quality of life and efficiency of care for senior citizens. The design and implementation of ASTRO robot was sustained by a multidisciplinary team in which technology developers, designers and end-user representatives collaborated using a user-centred design approach. The key point of this work is to demonstrate the general feasibility and scientific/technical effectiveness of a mobile robotic platform integrated in a smart environment and conceived to provide useful services to humans and in particular to elderly people in domestic environments. The main aspects faced in this paper are related to the design of the ASTRO’s appearance and functionalities by means of a substantial analysis of users’ requirements, the improvement of the ASTRO’s behaviour by means of a smart sensor network able to share information with the robot (Ubiquitous Robotics) and the development of advanced human robot interfaces based on natural language

A Short Review on Machine Learning in Space Science and Exploration

Machine learning is revolutionizing space exploration by tackling massive datasets, empowering astronauts, and driving scientific breakthroughs. From Deep Space 1's autonomous navigation to the James Webb Space Telescope's AI-assisted exoplanet discovery, Machine learning is transforming the present and shaping the future. With missions like NASA's Parker Solar Probe and the development of AI-powered monitoring systems and astro robots, the possibilities for unravelling the cosmos and democratizing space exploration are limitless. The future of space exploration lies in harnessing the power of ML to unlock the universe's secrets and make them accessible to all

Revolutionizing Interstellar Travel: Investigating Hydrogen and Oxygen Plasma as Cutting-Edge Rocket Propellants for Highly Efficient Thrusters

This research paper delves into the exploration of hydrogen and oxygen in a plasma state as potential fuels for rocket propulsion, aiming to enhance the efficiency and power of space travel thrusters. The study investigates the characteristics of plasma fuel, its combustion properties, and the feasibility of its implementation for interstellar travel

Futuristic Exploring of Ionic Wind Technology and Wind-Assisted Propulsion in a Comprehensive Journey

This research investigate into the convergence of ionic wind technology and wind-assisted propulsion, presenting a combined approach to enhance propulsion systems in diverse applications. Ionic wind, characterized by electro aerodynamic propulsion, involves the generation of ions through electrostatic fields to induce controlled airflow. Concurrently, wind-assisted propulsion leverages natural wind currents to amplify the thrust of vehicles or devices. Through a systematic investigation, this study aims to unravel the potential benefits, address the associated challenges, and illuminate the synergies emerging from the seamless integration of these innovative propulsion technologies

Agile Co-Creation for Robots and Aging (ACCRA) Project

__Introduction__ Worldwide population is getting older. The older persons want to stay independent and wish to increase their engagement in social activities to tackle loneliness, depression, and isolation. Starting from these assumptions, we developed the ACCRA project (Agile Co-Creation for Robots and Aging) with the aim to enable the development of advanced ICT Robotics-based solutions for extending active and healthy aging in daily life by defining, developing and demonstrating an agile co-creation development process. __Methods__ ACCRA robotics solutions will be designed and developed to be tested in three different domains: mobility, daily life, socialization support in four countries (i.e., France, Netherlands, Italy, and Japan). The proposed approach identifies four different phases: (1) needs analysis, (2) agile co-creation, (3) experimentation, and (4) sustainability analysis. Currently, the first two phases were almost completed. For the needs phase, we have used the following recruitment criteria: (1) for mobility: age ≥ 60 years, the and presence of mobility issues assessed by Older Mobility Scale (EMS) with a score > 13; (2) for daily life: age ≥ 60 years, and the presence of difficulties engaging in housework assessed by Autonomie Gérontologie Groupes Iso-Ressources (AGGIR) with a GIR score ≥ 4; (3) for socialization support: age ≥ 60 years, and the absence or mild level of cognitive impairment assessed by Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) with a score ≥ 24. __Results__ The needs analysis and first co-creation sessions focus attention on the experience of older in the four countries. Preliminary results showed how, in all the pilot sites, many expectations were raised from older, formal and informal caregivers about the application of the technology into their life. Minor concerns existed about privacy, real efficacy and modularity in a real-world environment. Overall, a good attitude was recorded towards the use of technologies to support life and promote independent living. Moreover, the older engaged in our studies showed a great interest to be actively involved in the developing phase of something built based on their needs. __Conclusions__ The availability of new solutions to increase independence and quality of life in a sustainable manner appears to be mandatory in the actual society considering the actual socio-economic situation over the industrial countries

Supporting active and healthy aging with advanced robotics integrated in smart environment

The technological advances in the robotic and ICT fields represent an effective solution to address specific societal problems to support ageing and independent life. One of the key factors for these technologies is the integration of service robotics for optimising social services and improving quality of life of the elderly population. This chapter aims to underline the barriers of the state of the art, furthermore the authors present their concrete experiences to overcome these barriers gained at the RoboTown Living Lab of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna within past and current projects. They analyse and discuss the results in order to give recommendations based on their experiences. Furthermore, this work highlights the trend of development from stand-alone solutions to cloud computing architecture, describing the future research directions

Real-time RGB-Depth preception of humans for robots and camera networks

This thesis deals with robot and camera network perception using RGB-Depth data. The goal is to provide efficient and robust algorithms for interacting with humans. For this reason, a special care has been devoted to design algorithms which can run in real-time on consumer computers and embedded cards. The main contribution of this thesis is the 3D body pose estimation of the human body. We propose two novel algorithms which take advantage of the data stream of a RGB-D camera network outperforming the state-of-the-art performance in both single-view and multi-view tests. While the first algorithm works on point cloud data which is feasible also with no external light, the second one performs better, since it deals with multiple persons with negligible overhead and does not rely on the synchronization between the different cameras in the network. The second contribution regards long-term people re-identification in camera networks. This is particularly challenging since we cannot rely on appearance cues, in order to be able to re-identify people also in different days. We address this problem by proposing a face-recognition framework based on a Convolutional Neural Network and a Bayes inference system to re-assign the correct ID and person name to each new track. The third contribution is about Ambient Assisted Living. We propose a prototype of an assistive robot which periodically patrols a known environment, reporting unusual events as people fallen on the ground. To this end, we developed a fast and robust approach which can work also in dimmer scenes and is validated using a new publicly-available RGB-D dataset recorded on-board of our open-source robot prototype. As a further contribution of this work, in order to boost the research on this topics and to provide the best benefit to the robotics and computer vision community, we released under open-source licenses most of the software implementations of the novel algorithms described in this work

Morale Onlife: problemi di soglia tra soggettività postumana e neo-alterità robotica

Lo sforzo del presente lavoro di ricerca è quello di evidenziare il gap che si sta consumando tra le crescenti possibilità biotecnologiche a disposizione dell’uomo e modelli morali e di governance anacronistici, inadeguati. La parabola descritta all’interno del testo prende le mosse da un rapido affresco dello sviluppo della bioetica e di uno dei suoi capisaldi, ossia il principio di autonomia dell’individuo, che trova espressione nella pratica del consenso informato. I problemi globali con cui siamo costretti a misurarci, da un lato, e le possibilità offerte dalle neuroscienze (e non solo), dall’altro, hanno alimentato l’ipotesi di investire su un potenziamento di tipo morale dell’essere umano (Moral Biomedical Enhancement). La discussione sull’opportunità di ricorrere a un potenziamento sintetico delle qualità morali dell’essere umano si è, poi, spostata su un piano più ampio. Il piano in questione è quello virtualmente illimitato reso possibile dall’infiltrazione delle Information and Communications Technology e popolato da nuovi agenti artificiali (neo-alterità robotiche). La rapida penetrazione di questi agenti in tutti gli spazi sociali, dall’ambito professionale fino agli impieghi “civili”, ha suscitato numerose perplessità, per lo più legate al possibile impoverimento dell’affettività umana − ridotta a un rapporto unilaterale e mendace con una macchina − e alla difficoltà di attribuire una qualche forma di responsabilità agli agenti artificiali, in caso di nocumento provocato a danno degli esseri umani. Sono state, così, vagliate alcune delle proposte morali più recenti, nel tentativo di alimentare ulteriormente il dibattito in questa direzione, perché sia possibile offrire modelli di convivenza in grado di interpretare la Quarta rivoluzione e, dunque, di far coesistere, pacificamente, non più “soltanto” gli uomini, bensì uomini, robot e macchine in grado di apprendere

Semantic models of scenes and objects for service and industrial robotics

What may seem straightforward for the human perception system is still challenging for robots. Automatically segmenting the elements with highest relevance or salience, i.e. the semantics, is non-trivial given the high level of variability in the world and the limits of vision sensors. This stands up when multiple ambiguous sources of information are available, which is the case when dealing with moving robots. This thesis leverages on the availability of contextual cues and multiple points of view to make the segmentation task easier. Four robotic applications will be presented, two designed for service robotics and two for an industrial context. Semantic models of indoor environments will be built enriching geometric reconstructions with semantic information about objects, structural elements and humans. Our approach leverages on the importance of context, the availability of multiple source of information, as well as multiple view points showing with extensive experiments on several datasets that these are all crucial elements to boost state-of-the-art performances. Furthermore, moving to applications with robots analyzing object surfaces instead of their surroundings, semantic models of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers will be built augmenting geometric models with accurate measurements of superficial fiber orientations, and inner defects invisible to the human-eye. We succeeded in reaching an industrial grade accuracy making these models useful for autonomous quality inspection and process optimization. In all applications, special attention will be paid towards fast methods suitable for real robots like the two prototypes presented in this thesis