12,254 research outputs found
Safety experiments for small robots investigating the potential of soft materials in mitigating the harm to the head due to impacts
There is a growing interest in social robots to be considered in the therapy
of children with autism due to their effectiveness in improving the outcomes.
However, children on the spectrum exhibit challenging behaviors that need to be
considered when designing robots for them. A child could involuntarily throw a
small social robot during meltdown and that could hit another person's head and
cause harm (e.g. concussion). In this paper, the application of soft materials
is investigated for its potential in attenuating head's linear acceleration
upon impact. The thickness and storage modulus of three different soft
materials were considered as the control factors while the noise factor was the
impact velocity. The design of experiments was based on Taguchi method. A total
of 27 experiments were conducted on a developed dummy head setup that reports
the linear acceleration of the head. ANOVA tests were performed to analyze the
data. The findings showed that the control factors are not statistically
significant in attenuating the response. The optimal values of the control
factors were identified using the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio optimization
technique. Confirmation runs at the optimal parameters (i.e. thickness of 3 mm
and 5 mm) showed a better response as compared to other conditions. Designers
of social robots should consider the application of soft materials to their
designs as it help in reducing the potential harm to the head
Adoption of vehicular ad hoc networking protocols by networked robots
This paper focuses on the utilization of wireless networking in the robotics domain. Many researchers have already equipped their robots with wireless communication capabilities, stimulated by the observation that multi-robot systems tend to have several advantages over their single-robot counterparts. Typically, this integration of wireless communication is tackled in a quite pragmatic manner, only a few authors presented novel Robotic Ad Hoc Network (RANET) protocols that were designed specifically with robotic use cases in mind. This is in sharp contrast with the domain of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). This observation is the starting point of this paper. If the results of previous efforts focusing on VANET protocols could be reused in the RANET domain, this could lead to rapid progress in the field of networked robots. To investigate this possibility, this paper provides a thorough overview of the related work in the domain of robotic and vehicular ad hoc networks. Based on this information, an exhaustive list of requirements is defined for both types. It is concluded that the most significant difference lies in the fact that VANET protocols are oriented towards low throughput messaging, while RANET protocols have to support high throughput media streaming as well. Although not always with equal importance, all other defined requirements are valid for both protocols. This leads to the conclusion that cross-fertilization between them is an appealing approach for future RANET research. To support such developments, this paper concludes with the definition of an appropriate working plan
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