Dimensional Analysis of Robot Software without Developer Annotations

Robot software risks the hazard of dimensional inconsistencies. These inconsistencies occur when a program incorrectly manipulates values representing real-world quantities. Incorrect manipulation has real-world consequences that range in severity from benign to catastrophic. Previous approaches detect dimensional inconsistencies in programs but require extra developer effort and technical complications. The extra effort involves developers creating type annotations for every variable representing a real-world quantity that has physical units, and the technical complications include toolchain burdens like specialized compilers or type libraries. To overcome the limitations of previous approaches, this thesis presents novel methods to detect dimensional inconsistencies without developer annotations. We start by empirically assessing the difficulty developers have in making type annotations. In a human study of 83 subjects, we find that developers are only 51% accurate and require more than 2 minutes per annotation. We further find that type suggestions have a significant impact on annotation accuracy. We find that when showing developers annotation suggestions, three suggestions are better than a single suggestion because they are as helpful when correct and less harmful when incorrect. Since developers struggle to make type annotations accurately, we present a novel method to infer physical unit types without developer annotations. This is novel because it is the first method to detect dimensional inconsistencies in ROS C++ without developer annotations, and this is important because robot software and ROS are increasingly used in real-world applications. Our method leverages a property of robotic middleware architecture that reuses standardized data structures, and we implement our method in an open-source tool, Phriky. We evaluate our method empirically on a corpus of 5.9 M lines of code and find that it detects real inconsistencies with an 87% TP rate. However, our method only assigns physical unit types to 25% of variables, leaving much of the annotation space unaddressed. To overcome these limitations, we extend our method to utilize uncertain evidence in identifiers using probabilistic reasoning. We implement our new probabilistic method in a tool Phys and find that it assigns units to 75% of variables while retaining a TP rate of 82%. We present the first open dataset of dimensional inconsistencies in open-source robotics code, to our knowledge. Lastly, we identify extensions to our work and next steps for software tool developers to build more powerful robot software development tools. Advisers: Sebastian Elbaum and Carrick Detweile

Design of a robotic transcranial magnetic stimulation system

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is an excellent and non-invasive technique for studying the human brain. Accurate placement of the magnetic coil is required by this technique in order to induce a specific cortical activity. Currently, the coil is manually held in most of stimulation procedures, which does not achieve the precise clinical evaluation of the procedure. This thesis proposes a robotic TMS system to resolve these problems as a robot has excellent locating and holding capabilities. The proposed system can track in real-time the subject’s head position and simultaneously maintain a constant contact force between the coil and the subject’s head so that it does not need to be restrained and thus ensure the accuracy of the stimulation result. Requirements for the robotic TMS system are proposed initially base on analysis of a serial of TMS experiments on real subjects. Both hardware and software design are addressed according to these requirements in this thesis. An optical tracking system is used in the system for guiding and tracking the motion of the robot and inadvertent small movements of the subject’s head. Two methods of coordinate system registration are developed base on DH and Tsai-lenz’s method, and it is found that DH method has an improved accuracy (RMS error is 0.55mm). In addition, the contact force is controlled using a Force/Torque sensor; and a combined position and force tracking controller is applied in the system. This combined controller incorporates the position tracking and conventional gain scheduling force control algorithms to monitor both position and force in real-time. These algorithms are verified through a series of experiments. And it is found that the maximum position and force error are 3mm and 5N respectively when the subject moves at a speed of 20mm/s. Although the performance still needs to be improved to achieve a better system, the robotic system has shown the significant advantage compared with the manual TMS system. Keywords—Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Robot arm, Medical system, Calibration, TrackingEThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

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

Design of a robotic transcranial magnetic stimulation system

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is an excellent and non-invasive technique for studying the human brain. Accurate placement of the magnetic coil is required by this technique in order to induce a specific cortical activity. Currently, the coil is manually held in most of stimulation procedures, which does not achieve the precise clinical evaluation of the procedure. This thesis proposes a robotic TMS system to resolve these problems as a robot has excellent locating and holding capabilities. The proposed system can track in real-time the subject’s head position and simultaneously maintain a constant contact force between the coil and the subject’s head so that it does not need to be restrained and thus ensure the accuracy of the stimulation result. Requirements for the robotic TMS system are proposed initially base on analysis of a serial of TMS experiments on real subjects. Both hardware and software design are addressed according to these requirements in this thesis. An optical tracking system is used in the system for guiding and tracking the motion of the robot and inadvertent small movements of the subject’s head. Two methods of coordinate system registration are developed base on DH and Tsai-lenz’s method, and it is found that DH method has an improved accuracy (RMS error is 0.55mm). In addition, the contact force is controlled using a Force/Torque sensor; and a combined position and force tracking controller is applied in the system. This combined controller incorporates the position tracking and conventional gain scheduling force control algorithms to monitor both position and force in real-time. These algorithms are verified through a series of experiments. And it is found that the maximum position and force error are 3mm and 5N respectively when the subject moves at a speed of 20mm/s. Although the performance still needs to be improved to achieve a better system, the robotic system has shown the significant advantage compared with the manual TMS system. Keywords—Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Robot arm, Medical system, Calibration, TrackingEThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Structural Organization and Chemical Activity Revealed by New Developments in Single-Molecule Fluorescence and Orientation Imaging

Single-molecule (SM) fluorescence and its localization are important and versatile tools for understanding and quantifying dynamical nanoscale behavior of nanoparticles and biological systems. By actively controlling the concentration of fluorescent molecules and precisely localizing individual single molecules, it is possible to overcome the classical diffraction limit and achieve \u27super-resolution\u27 with image resolution on the order of 10 nanometers. Single molecules also can be considered as nanoscale sensors since their fluorescence changes in response to their local nanoenvironment. This dissertation discusses extending this SM approach to resolve heterogeneity and dynamics of nanoscale materials and biophysical structures by using positions and orientations of single fluorescent molecules. I first present an SM approach for resolving spatial variations in the catalytic activity of individual photocatalysts. Quantitative colocalization of chemically triggered molecular probes reveals the role of structural defects on the activity of catalytic nanoparticles. Next, I demonstrate a new engineered optical point spread function (PSF), called the Duo-spot PSF, for SM orientation measurements. This PSF exhibits high sensitivity for estimating orientations of dim fluorescent molecules. This dissertation also discusses a new amyloid imaging method, transient amyloid binding (TAB) microscopy, for studying heterogeneous organization of amyloid structures, which are associated with various aging-related neurodegenerative diseases. Continuous transient binding of dye molecules to amyloid structures generates photon bursts for SM localization over hours to days with minimal photobleaching, yielding about 40% more localizations than standard immunolabeling. Finally, I augment TAB imaging to simultaneously measure positions and orientations of fluorescent molecules bound to amyloid surfaces. This new method, termed single-molecule orientation localization microscopy (SMOLM), robustly and sensitively measures the in-plane (xy) orientations of fluorophores (approximately 9 degree precision in azimuthal angle) near a refractive index interface and reveals structural heterogeneities along amyloid fibrillar networks that cannot be resolved by SM localization alone

Supplementing Frequency Domain Interpolation Methods for Character Animation

The animation of human characters entails difficulties exceeding those met simulating objects, machines or plants. A person's gait is a product of nature affected by mood and physical condition. Small deviations from natural movement are perceived with ease by an unforgiving audience. Motion capture technology is frequently employed to record human movement. Subsequent playback on a skeleton underlying the character being animated conveys many of the subtleties of the original motion. Played-back recordings are of limited value, however, when integration in a virtual environment requires movements beyond those in the motion library, creating a need for the synthesis of new motion from pre-recorded sequences. An existing approach involves interpolation between motions in the frequency domain, with a blending space defined by a triangle network whose vertices represent input motions. It is this branch of character animation which is supplemented by the methods presented in this thesis, with work undertaken in three distinct areas. The first is a streamlined approach to previous work. It provides benefits including an efficiency gain in certain contexts, and a very different perspective on triangle network construction in which they become adjustable and intuitive user-interface devices with an increased flexibility allowing a greater range of motions to be blended than was possible with previous networks. Interpolation-based synthesis can never exhibit the same motion variety as can animation methods based on the playback of rearranged frame sequences. Limitations such as this were addressed by the second phase of work, with the creation of hybrid networks. These novel structures use properties of frequency domain triangle blending networks to seamlessly integrate playback-based animation within them. The third area focussed on was distortion found in both frequency- and time-domain blending. A new technique, single-source harmonic switching, was devised which greatly reduces it, and adds to the benefits of blending in the frequency domain

The 1995 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Information Technologies

This publication comprises the papers presented at the 1995 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Information Technologies held at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, on May 9-11, 1995. The purpose of this annual conference is to provide a forum in which current research and development directed at space applications of artificial intelligence can be presented and discussed

Robot Manipulators

Robot manipulators are developing more in the direction of industrial robots than of human workers. Recently, the applications of robot manipulators are spreading their focus, for example Da Vinci as a medical robot, ASIMO as a humanoid robot and so on. There are many research topics within the field of robot manipulators, e.g. motion planning, cooperation with a human, and fusion with external sensors like vision, haptic and force, etc. Moreover, these include both technical problems in the industry and theoretical problems in the academic fields. This book is a collection of papers presenting the latest research issues from around the world